Fold outs | Dana Burrell… Art

As I continued to work through my latest sketchbook I came upon another one of the fold out pages. I had pasted a few extra fold out pages into my sketchbook never realizing the extent of the design challenge I’d have.

This time I had no idea what to do. Days went by, then weeks. Finally I sat down and drew out a few of my ideas. This is the design I decided to use drawn to scale in a squared Moleskine notebook.

The very act of drawing the thumbnail design fueled my desire to finally deal with the spread.

I drew a few maple leaves, painted the background and cut out a circle instead of cutting around the spiky bits of the leaves as I had originally planned. It’s good to reconsider a questionable plan instead of slavishly following a design that could easily fail.

Time to paint those leaves… look! I added a leaf in the cut-out!

When the left page is folded out the lyrics to one of my favorite jazz standards, “Autumn Leaves”, are revealed.

If I hadn’t taken a few minutes to draw out some of my ideas I would still be looking at these pages wondering what to do.

Thumbnail sketches to the rescue!

Before we get to the new year which, surprisingly is less than two weeks away, I want to share a few of my sketchbook experiments from the fall.

Back when I started this journal in September I added a few fold out pages here and there. This is my first from September 8th. (I usually date my pages but I missed this one.)

I went to a local farm with a few artist friends and as they spread out to paint the rolling landscape I chose to capture the barn. The silo would fit perfectly on the left fold up once the page was expanded.

I positioned myself so the truck would be hidden when the page was closed.