Saturday 29 October 2016

20:20 and a New Book

I’ve finished the prints for the 20:20 print exchange, just waiting for signing and numbering.  I have to deliver them to the press for the deadline on Monday.
  
At the moment I’m working on a new book for the book exchange group I work with. I enjoy having projects with parameters and deadlines that have to be kept to. I find it helps generate ideas for other things and there’s the added bonus of exiting books arriving in the post every three months or so.

We’ve had to move from the original host site at ‘artist books 3.0’ as it was shutting down so we now ‘meet’ through a new blog Collaborative Artists Books. We’re still finding our way communicating on the new platform but come over and see what we do.

The new title is ‘Endings and Beginnings’. It seemed appropriate in the circumstances but I think mine has morphed more into beginnings and endings.

I have been working on fairy story related images recently. ‘Once upon a time’ and ‘they all lived happily ever after‘ seemed a good starting point. After playing with the characters that seem to go in between I came to the conclusion that the majority of them are quite interchangeable; the baby/child, the good girl (princess or serving maid), the evil stepmother/queen. I decided to use silhouettes to emphasise the interchangeability (is that a word) of the characters.

At this point I started to explore structural and layout ideas.
  
The text here was awkward and the whole piece seemed a bit empty.
  
Better, but I didn’t like cutting into the pattern to make the silhouettes float.  More importantly I realised that this image had grown to 84cm (the same size as A1 paper – not leaving any wriggle room for printing if I want to use collagraph). If I wanted to keep the text at the sides I needed to lose some characters. I came to the conclusion (due to the lack of images I made while I was doodling) that the hero/prince and stepfather/king probably don’t interest me so they were the ones to go.
  
Think so far this is what I’ll work up.

Next step is to draw up my own silhouettes (you may have noticed the presence of Queen Elizabeth in the mock ups) and work out the border pattern      

Saturday 22 October 2016

More text

I want to incorporate more text into my images so I decided to explore press n peel again as a method of transferring a resist to aluminium plate.  
I was rather please with the results
Just sepia ink...
And with chine colle...
And with a stencil relief rainbow roll...
I decided to use one of the plates for my entry for the 20/20 print exchange. I’m half way there and very fed up of tissue paper butterflies!

Saturday 8 October 2016

Finished !

Four more prints before the block got too soggy to continue. I think they are better but for some reason they’ve decided to dry rather cockled. I’ll let the ink dry then I may have to re-soak them.

I think these are probably the last I’ll take off this block. Sometimes I think you have to recognise that it’s time to give in gracefully.

Saturday 1 October 2016

Useful resource

I thought people might find this useful.

I came across a post on Painting Speech which said “Claire Van Vliet and Elizabeth Steiner have made their 2002 book Woven and Interlocking Book Structures freely available in a variety of formats (PDF, EPUB, Kindle, etc.) at the Internet Archive. Published in 2002 and no longer in print, this book is a self-teaching manual with directions for making basic models of 16 book structures designed for Janus, Steiner, and Gefn Press publications. You can find it here at archive.org; download options are listed as links on the right.
If you follow Claire’s recommendation to print the PDF 2-sided and bind it in a 3-ring binder as a bench top manual, it will take 76 sheets of letter-size paper.”

I’ve been trying to get a library or a reasonably priced second hand copy for ages with no success. So I’d like to say thank you to Claire and Elizabeth for their generosity in sharing.