pencil

These are a couple preliminary sketches for the bookplates. There is a crow flying away right outside the frame in the one above, I haven't decided whether to put it in the trees or not.

When I'm in the first stage of creating I'm excited by a thousand ideas and have a hard time winnowing the number down, the second stage is me loving the piece I'm working on. As soon as I get near to completing a project I suddenly don't like it at all, and when I finish I can't wait for it to be gone. I never have a problem with falling in love with my work and not being able to let it go.

ex libris

I have been commissioned to create a series of bookplates, so I am casting about for direction. My first thought was a book curse and I was irritated to see that the one curse included in the Wikipedia entry is not from an ancient book, but was made up as a joke less than 100 years ago. It is funny though.

I love bookplates, small private works of art, I can see why people collect them. As I understand it the group of people collecting world-wide is so small they pretty much all know each other. I bought an old book recently and someone had carved the bookplate out of the front cover instead of steaming it off, maybe it was leather, apparently those are hard to remove. I made a few metal ones recently, etched on copper foil, for a friend.

*For those who didn't see the comments to this post, Mr Jaffe, a collector for over thirty years, gave the link to his bookplate blog, which has many beautiful and interesting images: http://bookplatejunkie.blogspot.com/