Mysteries of the Jacob's Ladder Unveiled in the Small Tutorial

Begin the tutorial by breathing slowly while looking at the moss-garden-in-a-bottle drawing at the top of the page.  (I need to get some more moss for it later today.)

I've spent several hours making a prototype of the devilish Jacob's ladder shown in the drawings below.  It isn't hard to DO, in that the skills you need are not high level.  But the tricky part is remembering the order of the steps and not gluing when you think you probably should.  It's very easy to make a stuck-together mess of things, and if that happens, all there is to do is peel things apart and start over.

I wanted a seven page or block ladder so I started with 14 blocks of cardboard approximately 3 1/2" high and 4 1/2" wide and three pieces of 1/2" wide x 40" long ribbon.  (In the actual edition I will be using clear plastic strips cut from the bottom of a shower curtain liner so that the printed images will show even though the strips pass over them.)

I first drew lines on seven of the blocks as shown in step 1.

The rest of the steps are on the first page above and on the second page, just above here.  I used high quality glue stick to stick the ribbons down and PVA to glue the plain blocks on top of the glued-down ribbons.  Try enlarging the page to better read my small and crabbed handwriting.

Last are two prints of Jesse.  There will be a print of him on every page of the Jacob's ladder, doing his driveway roll.  I carved a rubber block (that pink Speedball stuff), and here I tried out two different colors of stamp pad ink.  The surface of the blocks is going to be sanded milk paint.  This stamp pad ink (pigment style) prints well on sanded milk paint.