Bookmarks XIII: The Mage Wars

This week's challenge at Simon Says Stamp & Show is to "Read All About It": make something using text or books, or inspired by them.

I pretty much always make bookmarks when I papercraft, and that seems pretty book-related to me, but I figured that was rather less effort than the challenge designers were expecting. So I made some bookmarks specifically to go with a trilogy of books.

Let me just repeat a picture from my last post to show the book covers:

And here are the finished bookmarks:

That was my first try at reverse stamping, with the black gryphon. I quickly realized I wasn't going to become a master of reverse stamping in a half an hour (hah!), but since I was embossing, I just filled in all the less-than-perfect parts with an embossing pen... fake mastery!

I ended up tying the bookmarks together stylistically, smudging gradient backgrounds based on each cover and then stamping and embossing a gryphon of the title's color on a circle of fancy cardstock. Each bookmark is also splattered with mist flicked from the end of the tube: gold & silver with the black gryphon, gold with the white gryphon, and silver with the silver gryphon, which also helps tie them together. (I'm so glad I came across The Artistic Stamper's Splatters and Speckles Challenge; I wouldn't have thought of doing this otherwise and I love the effect.) Usually I tie bookmark duos together using colors and/or stamps, so doing it mostly with techniques here was new and fun.

In The Silver Gryphon, the gryphon protagonist Tadrith has a twin brother. My Tad has a twin too, the result of an attempt to make the yellow-green paper fit the blue-green of the bookmark better. I liked the green I got by covering it with ink, but alas! Tad #1 was unable to completely resist the ink and became a very dull little silver gryphon. I decided I wanted shiny silver more than I wanted better-coordinated paper.

(Tadrith in the book isn't actually a silver-colored gryphon; he's a member of a scout group called the Silver Gryphons. But just like the cover artist, Jody Lee, I rather skipped that nuance. SHINY GRYPHON IS SHINY.)

I'm entering this bookmark trio in the following challenges:

• Simon Says Stamp and Show: Read All About It (trio of bookmarks inspired by a trilogy of books)
• The Artistic Stamper September Challenge: Splatters and Speckles (gold and silver splattering)
• Simon Says Stamp Challenge: Put a Stamp on It (adorable Lawn Fawn gryphon on each bookmark, but no washi tape)
• Loves Rubberstamps Challenge #16: Anything Goes (the aforementioned adorable gryphon is part of Lawn Fawn's Critters Ever After set, which is carried by Loves Rubberstamps)

I'm also linking it up to DL.ART's 1000-post Linky Party.

Supplies: