Valentine Exchange

With all of the gelatin monoprints I've done, I knew I needed to use them to make my Valentine for the North Redwoods Book Arts Guild Valentine exchange or I would never hear the end of it! I decorated the printmaking paper using silver printmaking inks and hand-cut heart stencils. The heart at the end of the tunnel is also a monoprint. I used a colored pencil to draw graphs from EKGs all over the paper and used a stencil brush and artistic blending chalks by Inkadinkado to highlight the heart cutouts. The structure came from Alisa Golden's Creating Handmade Books and is one of my favorite card structures because as you open the pages it reveals more and more interesting parts of the card.  The structure is also "self-displaying" because it stands upright enabling us to view the heart at the end of the tunnel. The Spanish poem was copied from a carved wooden fireplace in a little hotel in Taxco, Mexico during a wonderful vacation with my daughter and husband.