Saint Therese "The Little Flower" fore-edge painting

A vanishing fore-edge painting of St. Therese of Lisieux

Happy feast day of Saint Therese of Lisieux, my friends!

“A Peach Rose over an Old Book”, by Marisa Tajada on Pexels

I hope “The Little Flower” (as she is called) has graced you with a rose today in answer to your prayers.

Last week, I worked on a fore-edge painting of St. Therese. It was painted onto a blank notebook with a brown faux-leather cover and pre-gilded edges (so I could get that magical ‘vanishing’ effect).

I gave the book to my sister (who is a Carmelite postulant) on October 1st, St. Therese of Lisieux’s feast day. This feast is one of three days in the year in which our local Carmelite convent opens their parlour to receive general visitors, so it’s really a special day!

Here’s a video of the finished fore-edge painting! It was only a small book, which created a small surface to work with, but I think I made good use of the space.

The work-in-progress photos that I took of this fore-edge painting didn’t turn out very well (my camera hated the lines of the paper), but here are some shots of the finished painting while it was still in the press:

Fore-edge painting of St. Therese of Lisieux on small gilded notebook

Things I learned from this project (every art piece teaches you something new!):

• This could be just the nature of kuretake paints, but painting sideways (not up or down) with your brushstrokes is by far the easiest way to spread colour across the pages. However, if there is even a fraction too much water/paint loaded onto the brush, it seeps in between the pages. Keep a rag or paper tissue handy to soak the excess water from your brush after each dab on the palette.

• Unlike normal watercolour paintings, you cannot whiten/add highlights to the painting with white gouache. I don’t know why I thought this would work, but if you do this, then you will (like me) end up with white marks on the gilding (eek!). I had to wet a cotton wool, squeeze all the water out of it, and then very, very gently dab at the white gouache to remove it. So, lesson learned: LEAVE AREAS OF PAINTING BLANK THAT YOU WANT TO APPEAR WHITE. The colour of the paper has to act as your neutral ‘white’.

• Speaking of the cotton wool clean-up: cheaply made pre-gilded books appear to have a sortof crushed glitter-gilding, which isn’t smooth but coarse, so it tears at the cotton wool even while you’re trying to clean up the gilding the way Martin Frost demonstrates in his tutorials. You instead end up with fluffy bits all over the fore-edge (double eek!).

• Despite these problems, the book turned out quite lovely, and I consider this a successful project. Onto the next fore-edge painting!

I’m going to participate in Inktober this year, too, so hopefully I’ll find the time to post weekly summaries of my artworks for that.

Till next time!

xx The Inky Baroness