Spoiler Alert

If you are taking part in the book swop Artist Books 3.0 #17 (CoLours/FolDing/ReCycling) - you might want to leave the page but if you are not....

 I finally finished cutting, folding, stitching and sticking. 

 This edition is named after the Hungarian map fold that I used as part of the structure. 

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.

A response

I don’t often make work that responds to current events so this is an unusual piece for me.

At the end of last week I was playing with recycling shopping bags. I had some vague plan of monoprinting leaves and also trying to reflect the mathematical sequences that occur in nature using it to make a fishbone/leaf fold book. 

 Ironing out the creases on the bags seemed to have left the paper brittle and the structure started to split on some of the score lines, like broken leaves. Somehow this fragility seemed to resonate with the events unfolding in France. 

The way that more and more people (of all faiths and countries) responded to this outrage seemed to reflect the increasing number sequences I had been playing with.

So my leaves have been replaced by words and my numbers with pencils. For once it seems that a book is the right place to make a response.

 

Holes

I’ve been working on a book swop for Artists Books 3.0. The theme for this swop is 'holes'. I was inspired by The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

Because of the way the book has developed, using pages from a recycled book, it won’t fit the size parameters for this swop but I'm going to finish the edition and use it for 'pay it forward' instead. 

This image is from the working proof. I’ll post more of the whole book when the finished versions have been sent out.