Sketchbook Cover Decoration

The first thing I do with a new sketchbook is label the cover with my starting month and year, and then add a second blank label below it for the future concluding date. It's a habit I started during my 2005 semester in France, since I was blowing through my sketchbooks faster than I ever had before. There were so many things to draw, journal entries to write. I think I went through almost a full book in a bit over month. When I got home, I labeled them with "France, book X out of 5" and then the dates it contained, so I wouldn't lose track of them among my many other completed sketchbooks that were boringly filled in the USA. And the I just kept labeling all the new sketchbooks after that with their start and end dates, because it just makes it easier to keep things in order.

All that to say, I filled out my sketchbook last month, as seen above. June to October, 2022. The last decade, I usually take over a year to fill up one book, including gradually decorating the cover with stickers I find along over that time. But starting in June I just couldn't stop drawing! In four months I PLOWED through that book, with barely any time to decorate the cover. As I was running out of pages, I decided to fill up space by creating my own "stickers" with scissors and mod podge.  

Jan Brett was my first favorite artist when I was a wee small child. I don't think I could even read yet? I loved her illustrated books though, and my mom took me to a signing she did in Seattle sometime in the early '90s. Meeting her was the first time I realized art didn't just magically manifest as a fully completed object on its own. I realized "Oh, actual people make these pictures. People make art. ...I'm a people. ...I could make art, too." And then my wee small barely-literate child-brain exploded.

This is a well-worn copy of Beauty and the Beast by Jan Brett that I plucked from one of those Free Library book exchange boxes on a neighbor's yard. Yes, cutting up a book used to feel sacrilegious to me, too, but I rationalize it by telling myself these secondhand books have already lived a full life and I'm paying my respect to them by reusing their illustrations in my own projects.

Beauty liberated, with a carrot from some secondhand health/recipe book in the process of being sliced out from its page.

I wound up cutting out some squash blossoms from the same health book and putting them in Beauty's hand instead. Then I printed out a handful of Lady Lovelylocks illustrations by Maria Gamiere (plus the other blue-haired girl picture that has been in my inspiration folder for years and who I embarrassingly did not save the credit to, sorry)

Carefully cutting out LLL.

Ta-da! (I did wind up filling up more space on here after I took this picture, but I didn't take a picture so now you can just imagine in whatever illustrations you'd prefer onto those blank spots.) ((Yes, on the bottom left, that's a tiny lil' Chesty from Jess Fink's delightful Victorian porno comic Chester 5000 XYV)

Here's Tig photobombing my portrait of these leek flower caps as the morning light made them glow (which, of course, they stopped doing once she blocked the light from reaching them by sitting down in that exact sunbeam.)