Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Grim

This is my traveling art journal that is going around a yahoo group called Paper Traders. Its called GRIM. I wanted it to be darkly tragic and romantic. It took on a life of its own. As the Dark Side often does. :-) Those are laminate samples on the cover.


This is the instruction page, inside the front cover. I found a disease census card in a pack of ephemera that I made into a pocket. Inside the pocket is a little booklet of very brief instructions. Also a tag with a hint of a story line: " 'Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite' they said as they smiled and turned out the light. Bed bugs, she thought. Do they know something that I don't know? Wait!
The inside lining has a collection of insect specimens with pins . Inside the pocket is a black paper that once held sewing pins.


The title page. Are definitions cliches? Probably. But I loved this one: ghastly, grim, grisly, gruesome, macabre...






I looked for a grim fairy tale on the internet. I wanted something dark and gruesome. I found one that was just right. It was an Andersen fairy tale called The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf. Click to read it. The heroines name is Inge.




The beginning of the story. I used a great quirky font called Rouble.





This is where Inge takes over. LOL! It becomes a story about her macabre fascination with bugs. Now, I added the needle paper and bed bug snippet into the instructions pocket. Inge is pulling this book together nicely.




Inge's mother saying goodnight. As she leaves the bedroom, she looks over her shoulder and Inge imagines bed bugs crawling all over her.
(whacked, I know.)






The artists sign-in page. The old parchment page and strip with a signature is from an old German book I found at a library sale. All the books you could fit in a bag for $10. The hand is a greeting card. I made pages inside for the contributing artists signatures. I can't wait to see where Inge leads them :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greets to the webmaster of this wonderful site. Keep working. Thank you.
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Anonymous said...

Very pretty site! Keep working. thnx!
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