Above: Sketch of a Duroc pig at the 2010 Minnesota State Fair. Staedtler Pigment Liner 0.5 on Gutenberg (130 gms). Click on the image to view an enlargement. (You will also be able to see the pleasant laid texture of this paper and the lovely flecks.)
Here I am about halfway through my nine-signature 2010 Fair journal. Because of its thickness it's a bit difficult to push flat on the scanner, hence the dark gutter shadow. On the Verso page you can see some paper buckling (I made this journal out of the lighter 130 gms weight Gutenberg because I was going to have a lot of signatures). In general pages I painted on didn't buckle that much. However, I did have to wait a bit for this page to dry before I could sketch on this spread! Even when it was dry enough to flip the page it was still too moist on this side to move the pen easily so I worked on the butt end of the pig.
Slowly I'm getting more pages scanned. As you can see I have the pages numbered. The page numbers fall within my usual paging practice which you can read about in Indexing My Journals.
I did the math incorrectly the other day when I had a fever. I posted that I had completed 123 journal pages. The journal actually has 121 pages, all filled, with the index stuck on to the inside back cover endsheet. (I did nine signatures of 16 pages each. When casing in the book I used the first and last page of the book block for endsheets. I cut out one sheet from each signature, thus removing 18 more pages; leaving a tab, to make room for collage items and photographs. And the first page of every journal that I do is a title page. But it was easy to see my math error when I had stamped in the page numbers!)
Working on journal cards is nice because scanning is so much easier, and there's no gutter shadow ever! But I must say it has been very nice to work in a journal, come home and not have to make a case at the end of the Fair!
