Looking More at Page Make Up—Part III: Evolution of Another Page Spread

Above: Fun with a rubberstamp alphabet and a sketch I made of Sir Michael Caine that I turned into custom rubber. This handmade journal has lightweight Gutenberg for its pages and is approx. 8 x 8 inches square. I used Brilliance rubber stamp ink. I colored and wrote with a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist's Brush Pen. Click on this image to view an enlargement.

I've been writing about page layout. So here's another page spread to look at. (Again, I'm not advocating these examples I'm showing you are good design—I'm just letting you know how I arrived at them, and how much fun I had doing the arriving!)

1. I read a New Yorker blurb about Sir Michael Caine in which he discussed an incident where his platoon was attacked during the Korean War. I was not aware he had served in Korea.This statement explained something about his demeanor that I had long wondered about and I wanted to keep it in my journal. I decided to use a full page spread to just capture the quotation. (Of course I could have used only a small portion of the page—this is the first decision.)

2. I remembered that decades ago I had sketched Caine and had a piece of custom rubber made so that I could add him to my envelopes when writing to friends. (I used to heavily decorate my envelopes with rubberstamping and calligraphy and illustrations.) I got the stamp out (it will come as no surprise to any regular reader that my rubberstamp collection is indexed for easy location and speedy use).

3. I decided to use brown ink because it is less strident than black, and I like the way it looks on the creamy color of Gutenberg paper.

4. I decided to stamp Caine slightly off center on the recto page, just once. (The inner most image.)

5. I decided that I really needed more views of Caine, so I stamped in the other two images in a line I eye-balled.

6. I covered the images with Post-it notes so that I could stamp over them. And then I began stamping the quotation.

7. After the first line I realized that I really needed a slightly smaller alphabet. I have larger, and I have way smaller. I'll have to find something that works for that intermediate size for another day. Undaunted I kept stamping knowing that I would hand-write the end of whatever didn't fit. I didn't worry about stamping off the page (I had waste sheets underneath each page so that I wouldn't get ink on the pages before or after this spread). I also wasn't worried about letters being obscured by the masked out images. When I got to "me." I realized that I could stamp another line below, with only the tops of the letters showing—OR I could stop there and write in the space at the right, and along the bottom of the page. I elected to do the latter. (For memory's sake I wrote the full location of the quotation on the last page of the journal, which is reserved for just that sort of note. I could of course try to cram it on the page, but sometimes it's just easiest to move it to a note page.)

8. I removed the Post-it Notes from the images and thought I could stop there, but decided instead on the spur of the moment, perhaps because the brush pen was in my hand, to color the background of the image area with the brush pen.

Examining the quirks of this spread:

a. The most important part of the quotation—"I'm going to die expensive"—is underplayed because of the use of the too-large rubberstamps.

b. I think the images of Caine should be larger for scale issues, just a tad larger. If the copier had not been broken I might have stamped an image and then blown it up and glued it in place. I might even have given up the multiple image idea, though that has grown on me.

c. It is my preference, when using rubberstamp alphabets in my journal to be a little more "messy" or haphazard. I tend to not fully ink the letters, and I don't worry about crossing the gutter with "perfect" impressions, if I have elected to work across the gutter (see the "e" in "die" at the bottom of the gutter).

d. It was fast, quick, lots of fun to execute, and now I have a record of the quotation that I can find at any time through my journal index.

Recommendation:

Find a speed at which you like to work, which preserves the tidiness you like to see reflected in your journal work. This tidiness level can change from spread to spread depending on the mood you're trying to capture. I hate to use a golf analogy, as I'm not a golfer (see Bugs Bunny on the subject), but I think a helpful way to think of this approach is to hit the ball where it lies and keep playing. If you land in the rough there are always fun ways to get out—if you ponder them for a minute. But don't ponder too long, or you'll end up in a muddle of indecision and there will be a lot of other players (creative ideas) who want to play through!

Comments

[Gina Lento]

I like Michael Caine, he's an amazing actor.

I remember that quote from somewhere, what movie was that?

[Roz Stendahl]

Gina, it's from a conversation that he had with someone interviewing him for the New Yorker Magazine. It was just in a recent issue in the front blurbs about things around town. You may have heard him tell this story to another interviewer on TV or something.