Emotional Times

It’s been a roller coaster of a month. My lovely dad died. And then on the day of his funeral Holly, our beautiful sixth grandchild, was born.

Making art didn’t happen much. Until last night when realising it was the NWBA zoom meeting in the morning I decided it was time to make something.

I went into the garden in the dark and rescued some leaves which I used to make a few double sided gelli print papers (the gelli plate seems to be my go-to method at the moment if I need something coloured to play with).

I used three of them to make slight variations on a single sheet folded book that I found in Alisa Golden’s book (she credits Paul Johnson with inventing it).

Version one has all the pages glued together and could be made with artwork on just one side of the paper. 

 Version two has one pair of pages left unstuck to provide a hidden space. 

And version three only has one page glued which makes an interesting structure with hidden spaces whichever way up you hold it.

 A small start but it was good to make something. 

(apologies for the colour in the photos - I thought I'd be clever and adjust the white balance for photographing indoors at night - I'll settle for auto in future)

Variations on a theme

For the NWBA theme of ‘Remnants’ I’ve been using gelli prints that were left over from other projects and using them to make a set of books all using the Reverse Australian Piano Hinge. 

I’ve enjoyed just exploring variations on a structure without worrying about the content. 

(what I'm not enjoying is trying to mannipulate images in this new blogger interface - I cannot get them to sit where I want them)

Winter and Sea

One of the advantages of having a workroom in a spare bedroom is that you can roll out of bed and start to fiddle. On the other hand it can get to 4 o’clock in the afternoon and you realise you haven’t got dressed yet and there’s printing ink all the way down the front of your dressing gown. 

This weekend I managed to finish two little books that should have been simple but for some reason I really struggled with.

The first one was in reponse to ‘Sea', the NWBA theme for the last two months’.  I decided to experiment using some small bottles (4cm tall) that I had in order to make 'A message in a bottle'.

Inside the bottle is a gelli printed strip of fabric with text on both sides.

One side has the romantic notion of being shipwrecked

 and the other what I suspect is closer to reality. 

I had been intending to make an edition of these little bottles for sale at a low price at the Manchester Book Fair but struggled with them.  I have finally ended up with four, all made slightly differently. They won’t be going to the Book Fair but I’ve learned a lot from making them.

I’m pleased with the shell and beadwork but this was so fiddly and time consuming that it isn’t an option for a low cost edition. Also I’m not happy with the text. Gum arabic transfer wouldn’t play and I don’t like the feel of the inkjet iron on transfer paper that I eventually used.

 I’ll probably come back to the idea and see what I can do with it in a couple of months.

The second book is the second in the Woodland series, also for a NWBA project. It also took disproportionately too much time from idea to finishing. Again that was down to time spent trying to get the right print method for the image and then making it work together with the text. Lots of learning and experimenting ended up in a very simple and small edition.

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.

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