Asemic writing

 It is finally done, printed, bound and wrapped ready for the post.

On another note at the North West Book Artists meeting we had a workshop on eco printing using plants. I am inspired I know what I can do now with all those vicious nettles that I spent the summer pulling out of the allotment.

Busy Weekend

It has been a busy few days with progress on several projects.

On Friday I printed the plate for the asemic writing book.  It worked much better than I thought it would. Now all I have to do is come up with covers for it.

On Saturday I led a workshop at the NWBA meeting. We made blizzard books based on the new Hedi Kyle book. This is ‘the one I made earlier’ as an example.

And over the weekend I finished the “’Reflections’ book (although not in time for the meeting).

To cover the boards that make up the pages I was going to make gelli prints with semi transparent colours over the top of printouts of dictionary definitions. But I made a discovery. When I smoothed the print on top of the paint I realised that it had taken paint off where the paper surface touched the plate but had left the text behind. This successfully printed off onto another piece of paper. (I’ve since read about the process on the internet but I hadn’t heard about it before). So I decided to make gelli printed text instead.

 I mounted the prints onto equilateral triangles of mount board

 and added mirrors and used a wire edge binding technique to assemble the book structure.

I must admit I’m rather pleased with it.

Asemic Printing

Having decided that hand writing was not the way to go I decided that I needed to experiment a bit with the letters and how I wanted to build the plate.

Tape grid and textured acrylic. I need to be careful not to make the paint pattern too dense.

Torn tape and textured wallpaper. The wallpaper is very difficult to wipe.

Tape grid, wallpaper, acrylic and tape. The differences in height make this difficult to wipe the darks without getting the lights too light.

 

Textured mount board with different tapes. Unfortunately the texture shows through everything.

This was just an experiment to see how it would work while I had ink mixed. I’d been reading here about using aluminium heating tape over the top of textures. I think this has real possibilities but unfortunately the tape I have is too narrow for the letterforms I need for the book size.

And most importantaly of all this week, on a family note we were delighted to meet grandchild number five this week. Welcome to the world Lily.

Making progress

I’ve made progress, in small steps, on a few different things over the past two weeks.

I’ve finished two monoprints for the Art Society project “every shape, every colour, every shadow, every line (and every colour)” this week

 The first was an experiment using shellacked mount board as a drypoint plate to get detail. 

 The second used masking tape and magic tape on binder plastic.I want to edit and print off some of the photos of the pier that I took at Christmas and then I think this project is finished.

At the NWBA meeting this week we tried out the diagonal pocket fold from Hedi Kyle’s book “The art of the fold”.  I do like using left over gelli plate prints for experiments.

I’ve also made a start on a structure for the “reflections” book due at the next meeting.

But I think I’ll be running late with this one.  I volunteered to lead the March workshop, exploring the blizzard book, so I need to spend some time working out sizes and making some models.

The Asemic Writing book is moving very slowly. I think I’ve got the basis of a plate design and I think, because of the size, it will need to be a collagraph, but I’m not sure what materials and textures to use. I’ll need to do some letter samples.

 And finally yesterday I finished the letterpress for the text and title page for "these are the fish...." Now all I need is for the ink to dry and I can begin assembling it