RSD Coffee Monsters Altered Board Book

Hi all. I have started yet another altered children's board book using images from Rick St. Dennis. This one will follow a coffee theme and will feature several of Rick's cute monsters because I am a monster without my morning coffee...and I am not alone! Besides, I love these guys. They are so fun!

The star of the first two page spread is the cute monster called Swixtus. He was coloured with Prismacolor and Polychromos pencils. He was fussy cut leaving a narrow white border and then matted with black cardstock. Swixtus was then popped up on foam dots for dimensionand Glossy Accents were added to his eyes. (Monsters like that.)

I began by sanding each page as well as the covers and then putting gesso on each spread. That is the tedious part because there is drying time and sometimes multiple coats depending upon how saturated the original colour was. Washi tape was adhered to the center line between the pages and then covered with gesso. For the first spread, brown Neocolor II watercolour crayons were  scribbled over the gesso and activated with water. This didn't give me the depth of colour that I was looking for so I topped that with Vintage Photo Distress stain. Yep, that did it! Jet Black and Coffee Archival inks were sponged through Sheena Douglass' Distress Grid stencil. White gesso was pounced through TCW's Tiny Circles stencil to apply more random pattern.

Coffee themed digital paper was cut into a rectangle and edged with Vintage Photo, then edged with black Big Brush pen. This and a scrap of a corrugated coffee sleeve were layered behind Swixtus and lined with black Big Brush pen. A small fussy cut clock ('cause it's always coffee time) was added to that vignette. To create a nod to  the sentiment, travel themed washi tape was adhered to white cardstock and added to the background. The sentiment was printed on white cardstock, edged with black. It was then attached to a coffee cup cut from French book text coloured using gelatos and Inktense pencil. The coffee cup started as Rick's Pencil Cup image which was used as a template. Another piece of the coffee sleeve was added under the cup and a coffee bean image was fussy cut and layered over both. The page was finished by die cutting a scalloped border from black and red cardstock. This border was split into two sections and adhered to each page. Black letter stickers were added to each section. A little outlining and edging of the pages with Black Big Brush pen completed the spread.

Thanks so much for joining Swixtus and me today. We're happy that you did that...and that you waited until we had our first fill up of coffee. We're so much more sensible after that. Stay tuned for more of Swixtus' friends when I post next week.

Life is good; so is art.
Bonnie