“All Through the Night”

These thirteen unbound book pages are housed in a clamshell box. They may be viewed individually or in sequence. The page sare 6” x 6”, and are numbered by gold dots at the bottom. The letterforms come from two different year long classes. The blackletter is from the current Primitive to Modern class, while the Carolingian is from the most recent 26 Seeds class in San Antonio. The book is titled “All Through the Night,” from a poem by Sir Harold Boulton, set to an ancient Welsh tune. I often lulled my children to sleep singing this lullaby.

The paper is 300 lb cold press Arches cold press watercolor paper. The pages with only text are painted with watercolor, and the text is written using Schmincke pan gold gouache andMartin’s Bleed Proof White.

The pages with paintings are double, i.e., the painting is on a piece of 5” x 5” 300 lb Arches cold press watercolor paper, glued to a 6’ x 6” painted paper, just like the lettering is on. The paintings feature gold - 24 K loose gold leaf placed in large areas which I burnished flat with a bone folder before laying the gold. Further gold, seen in fine lines of text and paintings, is bookbinders' 24 K gold on a roll, which is heat set. The tool to accomplish this is one which has multiple tips, a heat control, and is available at Talas in NY (talasonline.com, tacking tool, cool model, item #TTB068001).