My art group has started a new project. We are taking old, unwanted books, deconstructing them and then reconstructing into a new creation. Paula has tons of old books, antique papers, photos and memorabilia that she has shared with us.

She found the perfect book for me. A reference book about trees that came out in 1950. It’s a great start on another tree book.

We had a session on mark making. These are tools I have made in the past for mark making mainly using turkey feathers. They give some random looking marks which was great for our project. We used different tools on different types of paper to create some random and some not so random marks. None of these are finished “works of art”, but will be used in different ways when creating the book.

These first sheets were a start using different tools and getting some lighter, thinner marks and then thicker, heavier marks.

I then started thinking more about trees, branches and leaves. The bottom right is a Japanese newspaper that my friend Louise gave us.

Then I started playing with spraying water on the pages and then adding ink to create pine trees. This is a bit tricky on figuring how much water to spray first and then draw your trunk through the water and watch the ink spread. You can add little dots of ink where you need more branches.

This was my favorite of the trees that I created.

Here’s some leaves with different tools used to create different types of marks and lines.

I have also been putting gesso on a lot of pages so that I can either draw or add painting to the pages.

I chose my color scheme from this deconstructed screen print on paper. The colors will be black, burnt siena and yellow ochre. Perhaps there will be touches of green but I haven’t gotten very far yet. This will be another long term project that will be a slow work in progress. I will update you periodically on how it’s going.