Several months ago I had a hankering to get creative and let any artistic juices inside me flow. I went into a local used bookstore in Berkeley and found the perfect book to play with. Now dubbed “the book of orange,” my creative book buddy is/was full of instructions on how to decorate with flowers (late 70’s style). Images include not only lots of flowers, but tons of knick knacks (like ugly ceramic dogs and bird figurines). I don’t particularly like the flower arrangements, but i love the old-school aspect of the book (not to mention the fabulous orange canvas cover!). Will I be reading this book? No, no! It has and will become a completely different type of book wherein I can experiment with colors and different painting/mixed media techniques. The pages are huge and so smooth! One of my favorite pages (the clincher that encouraged me to buy the $1.00 clearance orange item) was of a metal fish surrounded by flower arrangements (surprise!). I painted over all the flowers (except two) so all the focus would be on the fish…and the once black and white image is now full of color. When I wanted to experiment with the screen printing process, my book of orange said, “try it on me! try it on me!” I created totally handmade (thus extremely crappy) screens of bacon and cherries and printed the images over several pages. The possibilities are endless with what I can do with my book of orange. On days like today where I have the entire apartment to myself and the hours to invest in something Aszi-fied my little orange book makes for quite possibly the best non-human or dog companion. Time to go play!