My Secret Garden Tunnel Book Project by Kimberly Baxter Packwood

My Secret Garden Tunnel Book Project 

by Kimberly Baxter Packwood

www.kbaxterpackwood.com

Supplies Needed

• Three Crows Stencil 
• Black Birds in Tree Inverse Stencil
• Graphite pencil with a very fine lead
• Mixed Media Paper 130# or heavier
• Double sided paint
• Self-healing cutting mat
• Xacto knife with a new blade

Watercolor paints:

• Viridian green
• Lemon yellow
• Yellow green
• Deep Violet
• Rose Red
• Prussian Blue
• French Ultramarine Blue
• Yellow Gold
• Van Dyke Brown

I’ve been wanting to create a tunnel book for awhile now and used two of my stencils to create My Secret Garden. It’s no lie I love crows and enjoy them daily in my garden, and most days there are huge flocks of them in my Maple tree at dusk.

I started by tracing around the Black Birds in Tree pencil onto a piece of paper

approximately 5" x 7" inches in size.

I then started cutting out the “background” areas that were not either part of the tree or a bird,

I auditioned the stencil placement on the paper to ensure that I had enough negative space so as to see the other pages behind this page.

Detail of the cut outs.

I then painted the tree branches with a yellow gold and the birds with French ultramarine blue.

I drew around a lid and cut out a central hole in what would become my cover for my tunnel book, and drew flowers onto the paper using my graphite paper freehand style.

I painted the flowers using the dark purple, bright blue, rose pink, and the lemon yellow.

And decided that the lemon yellow was too bright so painted a wash of green gold over the cover page to subdue the colors. Doing so made the flowers pop even more from the page.

I then created a third page that would become the back page of my book, by laying my Black Birds in Tree Inverse stencil onto the page and auditioned the placement so as to have a different image than the cut out page.

Once I had a pleasing placement I traced it with my graphite pencil.

I then painted the background using French ultramarine blue, and the painted the tree with Van Dyke Brown and added a wee bit of that yellow gold color on top to make it look like there were light and dark areas.

The birds were then painted by combining Van Dyke Brown, French Ultramarine Blue, and deep Violet.

For the third page I drew the standing crow from my Three Crows Stencil, near the bottom third of the page.

I then cut the top third of the page away leaving a thin border on the sides.

I painted the sides of the page with green gold paint, and the bird with the same mixture as the previous birds, Van Dyke Brown, French Ultra Marine Blue, and deep Violet.

I used a mish mash of the colors to create the accordion fold sides,

trying to make interesting marks that are reminiscent of animal tracks.

Back cover attached to the accordion folded paper.

Second page being installed onto the accordion folded paper using double sided tape.

Detail of the three pages attached the left sided accordion folded paper.

First page being installed onto the accordion folded paper.

Both sides of each page have been attached to the according folded bindings and now awaits the front cover.

The accordion fold bindings viewed from the outside.

Detail shot through the front cover.