Wednesday 2 July 2014

The First Rule About Book Club...



I was asked to make some cookies for a book club meeting, and after mulling over a few ideas such as reproducing famous book covers, or illustrating book related images, it occurred to me that I could illustrate books and then see if the club members could guess which books they were. I decided some should be obvious and some should be more obscure.

 
I mulled over a few ideas for images but some were tricky to work out as images alone - ladies in high-waisted dresses could apply to quite a few early 19th Century novels!  

So I decided to add quotations from the novels, again trying not to choose ones that were too obvious or too obscure. In addition, some could be slightly obscured by the images, whereas others needed to be more readable. 

The style of the cookies came about from their needing to be big, to accomodate the quotations and images. I flipped a plaque shaped square cookie on its end and piped 'stretched' paper canvases in a flood layer, after spraying the corners of the biscuit with bronze lustre.

It wasn't too much of a leap to decide to make the background look 'paper' like with dark ivory icing and dark lustre dust to age the edges.
 
I dried the flood layer in the dehydrator to get a nice shiny surface to write on. Unfortunately the brown fine tipped pen I'd ordered for the task of writing wasn't quite as fine as others I've bought in the range (the black is much sharper and worked very well for drawing the ink botles and quills on the 'filler' cookie hexagons), and the writing turned out a little more fuzzy than I'd intended. In addition, somehow my writing goes a bit wonky when I know that there's no room for error! My jaw ached from gritting teeth by the time I'd written all of them!



I also made a selection of 'filler' hexagon cookies, hand drawn with quills and ink bottles, using black edible ink. 


(Scroll down and mutter about finding the 'lock screeen' button on your ipad/phone for the answers.)


Answers:

1. sǝɯɐƃ ɹǝƃunɥ ǝɥʇ
2. qǝʍ s,ǝʇʇolɹɐɥɔ
3. ǝɔıpnɾǝɹd puɐ ǝpıɹd
4. pɹıqƃuıʞɔoɯ ɐ llıʞ oʇ
5. ɯɹɐɟ lɐɯıuɐ
6. oƃɐʌıɥz ɹp
7. uʍop dıɥsɹǝʇɐʍ
8. puɐlɹǝpuoʍ uı ǝɔılɐ
9. ǝqoɹpɹɐʍ ǝɥʇ puɐ ɥɔʇıʍ ǝɥʇ 'uoıl ǝɥʇ
10. ʞɔıp ʎqoɯ

4 comments:

  1. exquisite! you are so very talented.

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  2. Absolutely gorgeous!!!! I recently tried drawing with a food safe marker on a cookie, but I found the ink to bleed quite a bit. How do you stop the bleeding? Is the brand of marker? The icing base seems very porous to me. Thank you. Gabrielle

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    Replies
    1. Thank you! I dried these cookies in a dehydrator as that makes the surface hard and shiny. Also I don't use anything to soften my icing, like glycerine or corn syrup. Sometimes if the weather is humid, the surface of the icing can seem a little more porous so perhaps that contributes to it too? Maybe the brand of pen? I used a Rainbow Dust double ended pen, and found the brown to be a little fuzzier than the black, but I think that was the nib of the pen rather than bleeding. (If you look at the drawn ink bottles and feathers, and the spider web, all in black, the lines seem to me to be sharper than the handwriting in brown, though it's the same brand of pen).

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