Colophon
This book began its journey as a 25.5″ x 40″ sheet of Arches Text Wove paper. I painted red and blue acrylic lines on it with two sponge brushes then sliced off an end to use as a practice sheet. I then folded the rest in quarters both ways and cut it to make it into this meander book format. To give it a theme I wrote a poem titled Road Book Rules and sent it with my embryonic book to my friend, Heather Mallett.

Heather made some clever little signposts with signs that she downloaded from the internet, put them in an envelope with the book and sent it on to Nancy Ellis.

Nancy wrote the song Happy Wanderer in pencil on one road and added a green and yellow forest in gouache before passing it to Judy Bainbridge.

Judy added outlines of human and dog footprints and the text of Dr.Seuss’s Foot Book running through the book and sent it back to me.

Nancy’s forest dissolved under a wet brush becoming a yellow-green background for the whole book. Then I added yellow and white roads with undiluted Tri-Art acrylic ink then added some pastel shavings, really liked the effect and added more until the whole book was covered with pastel. Multiple layers of SpectraFix, a casein-based fixative account for its slightly sour milky smell.

With the helpful critique of my husband, Neill, I reworked the text of my poem, changed the title then lettered it with a mixture of W & N Permanent White gouache and Pro White.

Before I could go any further I took a box construction workshop from Sarah Bryant at Wells Book Arts Summer Institute. This book claimed the partitioned box with the hinged lid. I covered the box with bark cloth that I had purchased in Uganda, found a leather scrap that worked for a handle and added a button from Sarah’s grandmother’s button box for the closure. The Summer Institute provided some book cloth to compliment the bark cloth.

For the illustrations I was inspired by two paintings that we had bought at the Craft Museum in Delhi in 1992 from two Warli artists, Ghaku Vithal Karu and Bhapya Lakhma Tumadha, working in the courtyard. They depicted village life using white stick figures. One painting had a background of dark brown paint and the other used the traditional dung.

I still needed to find a use for Heather’s signs and all the partitions.  First the signs were reprinted with vector images with archival ink. Then I made a game board to fill the space under the book. That made two sections for tokens — a Magic Hat beer cap that says “It’s Definitely Possible” found one morning at Wells, a ball of coloured string from my friend Jean Christianson, a green tree snail shell from my birth country, New Guinea, a blank accordion folded book from my defunct marbling business in Kenya, a porcelain crab from a box of Red Rose tea and a Chinese-made compass found in a basket in our living room.

An eBay search turned up wonderful marbled green dice at nobleknight.com. Then there was room for eight watercolours pans, a brush and 50 sheets of Arches cold pressed watercolor paper. That left two spaces for stones to build inukshuks.

I am very grateful to all those named and unnamed who have helped this book and game along their journey so far. I hope that my fellow travelers find as much joy in them as I have had in their creation. Elizabeth McKee, December 2013.

The little purple bags were added to make sure things stayed in place during shipping.