The Van de Graaf Canon Caper

The Concept
There's a few different shapes I love more than toast itself. Hearts are one of them. I decided to choose a simple heart-shaped pattern, with a few variations. The left design features a smaller set of hearts with the larger heart from the right hand side at a golden point, while the right design features the larger set of hearts all over.


The Process
First, I created the Van de Graaf canon on the papers, as per these instructions, and calculated the golden points using the unit squares method. Then, I had the major fun of trying to create a decent ink-holding stamp out of various materials I had scattered in my craft boxes. I found that cardboard by itself was no good at holding ink. I thought that maybe if I attached a cloth that could hold ink well to the cardboard I would achieve better results. I then hot-glued some felt scraps to cut pieces of cardboard, and stuck corn cob skewers into the tops of the cardboard pieces to make handling a bit less messy. Those cardboard pieces held ink like nothing else. Finally, I moved my paper to a safe place to dry, away from my psychotic cats (who use anything and everything as a bed).

 

The Concept

Simplicity reigns supreme here. I opted for a simple juxtaposition between vertical and horizontal in these images. The circles of jagged lines represent the golden points on these two pages. In hindsight, even though those were drawn as circles, I can definitely see how they could be construed as hexagons in both designs. 

The Process

I used the same methods mentioned previously to create the two page divisions and to calculate the golden points in each of these. Then, I measured and created the lines with roughly 1/4 inch separations in between them in pencil initially. I drew same sized circles around the golden points to create the area where I was going to divide the lines into those zigzags you see in the image. The zigzags were created and were the first areas to be drawn over in ink. After I inked those over, I drew over the lines very carefully in ink using my ruler as a guide.