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.

If there is paper

The pages have been cut down, the boards covered and the books assembled.

 The lettering isn’t perfect but I’m quite pleased with them as a first attempt.

Pages printed

I had forgotten how much preparation goes into teaching a workshop, especially when it takes place in a school hall rather than a studio space. Most of last week was spent tearing paper, collecting materials and muttering to myself as I rehearsed and tried to refine what I was going to say. The meeting took place on Tuesday night and I think people enjoyed it; the group are mainly painters so this was something a bit different. I was so busy I didn’t have the chance to take photos of the work but everyone got at least one print made.

All of which meant not much happened to take my own work further, but I did get to HDP on Friday and managed to print the words on top of the monoprints I’d done last session....

 and to make a set of coloured monoprints with words (the colours are rather garish but I wanted contrast to explore the technique).

These pages will be cut down to make a small edition, hopefully in the next few days.

Baker’s Dozen Completed

Just before Christmas I spotted a call for entry for the Liverpool Book Fair. They are running an exhibition at the Liverpool library alongside the book fair. The theme of the exhibition is Frankenstein (the book is 200 years old in 2018). I started playing with ideas, one of which meant constructing interlocking spirals. Though I’d never used it before I thought about using a wire edged binding to make up sections of the spirals.

I was short of a book for my ‘baker’s dozen’ challenge and thought exploring this construction might kill two birds with one stone. I made gelli prints using circles, rectangles and triangles as a starting point for the motifs and using the three process colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) plus white to keep the colour scheme simple.

This week I cut 24 ‘pages’, attached the wire edging and started to assemble them

 I started using embroidery thread which looked ok but half way through, when I was seeing how many different ways I could fold the books, I realised the knots were coming undone.

So I had a go with thin copper wire. This was more secure and I like the look of it better.

 I made four sets of 6 pages...

 then combined these into two sets of 12 (though I may separate one of these back into two again).

These books don’t have a front and back cover so I decided that they needed a box to protect them.

Then later in the week I went to HBP and printed up the type I’d set before the holidays.

Each one looks unbalanced as single prints but they are designed to be cut down and made into a small book. It seems an appropriate way of presenting the text (which is a quote from Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge).

So now last year’s challenges are completed (more or less),  the Christmas decorations are packed away and it’s time to move on into the New Year and see what that brings.

Fragmented

I finally decided that using gum arabic or cutting text into blocks was all very well but for some projects you just need proper set type. So last weekend I went to another workshop at HBP. Elizabeth Willow was teaching letterpress, wood type and book making (all in 2 days!).

We had to take a word to use. I chose fragmented. I thought it would lend itself well to book structures.

We used the Adana presses to print metal type on bookmark sized paper

  and the Albion presses for wood type.

 I was overjoyed to find that you can move the metal type onto the relief press and combine the two.

We made the prints into several different book structures.

Even with such a fantastic teacher I know two days is nowhere near enough to become proficient but I’m hoping I’ve learned enough to be able to go in to play and work some of it out for myself now.