Jennifer Crusie's Blog: Argh Ink

So I’m starting Liz Danger, and I’m so excited. First person, short narratives, linked together, I love it. So of course I started the collages.

Since there are four Liz books in the series, I wanted to make the four collages work as a series, too. I started with shadow boxes but they were way too small, so I went to square pieces of foam core, no shelf for 3D this time. I was planning on hanging them two up and two down to make a big square, but I may leave them as they are now, leading into one another horizontally, the way the books lead into one another. Except the books access each other, too, so the four square might be better, especially since the last one leads back to the first. So I’ll have to cogitate.

Making the base collage was fun because I was working with the four title colors from Lavender’s Blue, Rest in Pink, Peaches and Screams, and Yellow Brick Roadkill. Krissie and Lani and I hit the craft stores and a scrapbook store, and I have to tell you, finding papers that looked right for the four books really helped me conceptualize them. They were all so different, but they all nailed the feel of the book I wanted. Then we came home and I put the backgrounds together. The orange wasn’t orange enough and the yellow wasn’t yellow enough so I had to do some tweaking, but in the end, I got four backgrounds that felt like the books to me. There’s still too much green in the Yellow Brick Roadkill collage, but I can fix that later. (Click the thumbnails to see bigger pictures.)

The collage for Lavender’s Blue is almost finished, so it’s harder to see that background, but it’s all lavenders and purples with some silver glitter details that left me twinkling for days. (Lani laughed and laughed and said, “You have glitter all over you, you sparkle.” I said, “I’m a vampire, so let’s watch that tone, shall we?” Well, you had to be there.)

Rest in Pink takes place in June at a little girl’s beauty contest, so it’s mostly interior, too, with lots of sparkles and crowns.

Peaches and Screams takes place at the county fair, so it had to feel like August, mostly outside, with that last-days-before-school heat and dust.

Yellow Brick Roadkill is about a high school drama production of The Wiz, and it takes place in November, mostly inside, so there’s a lot of theater imagery along with the Wizard of Oz stuff. (For those of you who knew me when, the choice of The Wiz for the play came from the title; the fact that we once did sets and costumes for a real high school production of The Wiz is just gravy. And how are you guys doing these days? You’re all in your thirties now, which boggles my mind because that’s how old I was when I was yelling at you to get out of the damn rafters before you killed yourselves. Or hyperventilating because you’d just told me the light booth had caught fire but it was okay because you’d put it out. Or trying to figure out how to keep those trees moving, remember that? Good times.)

Where was I?

Oh, right, the collages. The big deal for me was seeing how they worked together as a composite, the colors overlapping on each other, yet also worked alone as complete collages, the way the individual books have to stand alone. Once I started bleeding images and colors among the collages, the feel of them changed and became more complex. Doing all the backgrounds helped me conceptualize the series, while doing each collage helps me conceptualize the individual books. The whole process was really valuable. Also fun. Did I mention fun?

And now I’m writing Lavender and I know exactly where I’m going because it’s on the collage. Life is so good. And I love Liz.