A shoal of books

It’s been a couple of weeks of trying move several things further on.

The asemic writing books now have covers waiting for the text to be put in and the labels to be stuck on,

I’ve written the text for ‘Winter’, the next book in the NWBG series responding to woodland

and I’ve finished ‘Blake’s Book’ at last. It was an awful lot of printing and experimenting for an edition of four but I’m finally happy with it.

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

Letters

I’ve been focusing on letters this week.

Last summer my four year old grandson gave me a book that he had drawn. As he was explaining it he said ”and that is the fish that ate my words”. I thought that was a great idea for a book or print and I’ve been looking for the words ever since. He came to stay in November. He had been learning about the centenary of the end of WW1 at school and he chanted himself to sleep. “No more war, war is bad, we want peace, peace is good”. I’d found his words.

Some experiments in letterpress with wooden type

and metal type

I’ve also been trying to push the asemic writing book further on. The inks that I was playing aren’t drying and I’ve come to the conclusion that my freehand writing skills leave a lot to be desired.

So I started to look at constructing single letterforms that looked convincing.

I tried them on pages (boring)

And as cut outs (too geometric)

And more cut outs. I liked this one but it is only 7 cm high and when its enlarged it’s too crude

So I’m trying adding more letters.