cover of letter journal

First off, let me say that I think this goes with the Illustration Friday theme of "Novelty." =shrug=

The occasion for this collage is that a friend sent me a perfectly delightful letter journal—for writing in and mailing back and forth—but gack! it had hearts on the cover. For some reason I can't stand hearts. Anatomical hearts are great: it's just the symbolic ones that get on my nerves. So, after pondering about what to do with it for several weeks, I decided to rip the hearts off and make a collage cover for it. I sure hope she doesn't hate it.

The round things in the upper left are photos of bun ingots from circa 3000-year-old metallurgy. The orange-and-blue one is (obviously) copper, and the grey one is tin.

Then I decided to stick with the blue-and-orange theme and glue a photo of an azure kingfisher (native to Australia & New Guinea) across the spine of the journal. And of course, you will no doubt recognize Robert Smithson's artwork "Spiral Jetty" (photo taken in 1970), which was 15 feet wide and 1500 feet long. Something pleasing about those numbers...

And the background for all this frivolity is actual (not facsimile) ledger paper from a 19th-century business: you can read the date in the upper left. Don't you love those ink splatters just below the tin ingot? =grin=