Mainly collagraphs and books.

What happened to March?

Well, I’ve been experimenting with different materials to see what new effects I could get. Given my interest in buildings as a motif I’ve been looking at trying out stuff for stonework.

Tile cement works well when you want a dark wall but I’m trying to combine my collagraph plates with monoprints. I needed something that would hold line and some textural marks but not be too dark overall so that the underlying colour would show through.

I’ve ended up with the plain mountboard for dressed stone and acrylic paint for the rougher textured walls. The plate needed areas of selected varnishing (rather than just straightforward coats applied over the whole areas) as the painted areas needed a lot less varnish than the other parts of the print.

I also signed up for the next book swop.  The brief is “Recycled/ Folded/ Colour”(any or a combination of the three - so far I don't think I'm using colour), A6, any appropriate structure. I’ve been working through ideas.

I came up with several that I liked including a shell like book and a book that opens on all four sides of the cover (it’s so simple I’m sure someone else must have done this but I don’t remember seeing it anywhere). The problem was they worked well in the roughs at a small scale but at the right size in the paper I wanted to use they were too floppy to support themselves.

 I will return to these books later but for this edition I have decided to combine Hungarian map folds with a folded accordion structure. I’m using hard backed books from the charity shop for the covers and most of the paper and adding pages made of recycled tissue paper that I have used between prints when drying under pressure.

The design still needs tweaking, I need to work out how to close it, what end papers and how to seal the edges of the cover boards. No art work to do but an awful lot of folding, sewing and sticking.