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.

Woods and Christmas

I finally finished Reflections, just in time for the December meeting of the NWBC.

The drawings are based on the photos I took on our walk in autumn. In the end I decided to use inktense crayons.

The sides and endpapers are taken from a map of 1894 showing the farms and buildings that were on our route before the woodland was planted.

I ended up unsticking and repositioning the pages and sides several time in an effort to get the pages to sit flat when it was folded up. I more or less got there in the end but I’m glad I printed the sides on fairly substantial cartridge paper.

I’d never made a tunnel book before and it was an interesting experiment, but I probably won’t make another one for a while.

We all took a small blank book to the meeting (I made a blizzard book with single pages) which we swopped round so everyone filled in page in everyone else’s book, a sort of extended joint Christmas card.

A Walk in the Woods

For the October meeting some members of the members of the NWBC met up at Harrocks Wood in Irby. Those of us who couldn’t make it to Irby have visited our own special woodland places.

The idea is to respond and produce 'REFLECTION’, a folding book, for the December meeting

I was on a course at HPB that weekend so my visit to the woods took place last week. It was half term so we had a family trip, three generations.

My woods are Brinscall Woods. I grew up in Brinscall and we played in the woods as kids. It seemed to us that they had always been there. It was only recently that I read a book ‘The farms of Brinscall Moor’ and realised that the place we played in used to be farmland which was only forested in the early 20^th century.

We knew about the ruins of the big house, Heatherlea, which still had some intact walls with window openings when we were little (much of it has fallen now). But the rest of the walls which ran through the wood we just accepted as being there and didn’t give them much thought.

I want to use some of the techniques we experimented with on the October HBP course for this book and to base the prints on the photos I took on my visit in October. I also want to combine these prints with sections of 19^th century maps of the route we walked and add reference to the people who used to live in these farms.

I’ve done a mock up and at the moment I’m thinking of a blizzard book. 

That’s the plan but I’ll see what happens

These are the first monoprints, just experimenting with technique.