Star Mirror

Our home is so full of things, picked up here and there, and the garden walls are also hung with objects. It is a method of  decoration that is accumulation, with a space found for a new object add to the accumulation: this is not interior nor exterior design. More a “Burglar Bill” approach. Most things have a history before we acquire them. However, the garden itself has a pattern, and the garden shed is a miracle of organisation. Still, many things are piling up, they kind of shuggle into place, and if some bookcases are hang from walls, or set up on tables, then so what.

The Midnight Hare, putting the pages together

The Midnight Hare, Page 9

The Midnight Hare page 6 new version

At last I am discovering a technique that suits the atmosphere of the book, that integrates the pages, and that I enjoy doing. Also it doesn’t take too much time.  The disadvantage is that I keep wanting to redo the pictures! I made an experiment with this picture in that the white lettering was done by hand on the old version and then cut and pasted on top of the main painting in Photoshop; then I used the eraser to clean it up a bit, though left a bit of the smoky background (from the old version) as I quite liked the accidental effect. It isn’t a good idea to put any text in illustrations in any kind of a permanent way because of the difficulties if the book is translated.  When putting in the typed text I suddenly found that it was creating a strike through effect which I certainly did not want.  But a generous lady on You Tube had been working on this effect, so I found out that I needed to highlight a scrap of text and do control/shift/slash. Thereafter the text printed out OK. The wonders of communication. The text layout is a bit dull but I can work on that; I think the basics are there now for this page.