This is the beginnings of the page I made for Gayle. Her theme is All Creatures Great and Small. I wanted to do an animal that is native to Montana so I chose the grizzly bear. I had a photo from a calendar that I used as inspiration. I thought just the face coming out of the page would give a bigger impact and give a sense of the size of grizzlies. I painted this with a combination of walnut ink and Jacquard paint.

 Then I thread sketched the bear. I used about ten different shades of brown for this. Even with two stitch and tear sheets behind the page, it still distorted quite a bit. But except for a few wrinkles here and there, I got it flattened back out again. The shape of the page makes her look a little like a cone head, don’t you think?

 Here’s a close up of the eye. I left the white part of the eye unstitched so that caused a bit of distortion.

 Here’s another close up.

And here’s the back. I hope you like it, Gayle. This is the last page I have to do for this swap. Next, after I get my last two pages, I’ll be putting the book together.