Moving into the new year

My puppets are slowly developing into print. I've got the first block drawn out ready to start working into.

While I was doing that I had some ideas for the words for the slotted tab book that I was working on before Christmas. 

The words impose a structure because they have to be revealed in the right order, but I still want the feel of meandering, not straight forward page turning, while reading it. I also want it to look like a section of maze when it is opened out.
 

This is a mock up which uses the slot and tab and the woven paper joinings that I have been exploring recently. Now I need to work on the imagery and refine the text.

My favourite things

 The art society has set a theme of 'my favourite things' as something positive for members to work on over this strange Christmas period.

As books and narrative have always been one of my favourite things. I thought about using fairytale characters and situations as my subject matter

Theatre, both to watch and to take part in (strictly backstage only) is another of my favourite things and I've also been enjoying experimenting with making puppets recently.

I think I'll enjoy the combination of theatre, puppets and fairy tales

 As a starting point I made some flat articulated figures to play with.

 

Bluebeard's Wives

I printed the etching this week. Before I did I thought that I’d probably work further into the image to put some tonal modelling on the puppets, but when they came off the press I decided that I didn’t want to loose the contrast with the background.

I also printed a series of double sided papers for the Collaborative Artists Book swop

and started a set of drawing for a book that I want to print using photo litho. (No images yet they are still at the very rough stage.)

Yesterday we signed up for a plot on the local allotments. When I say we, what I mean is my husband signed up and he’ll do the digging. I’m going to go along and draw. There are lots of interesting structures, sheds and green houses down there just waiting to be turned into prints.

Etching and “?”

I’m enjoying this hopping around.

On the etching front I spent yesterday biting the plate but didn’t have time to print it. The gelli plate printed textures seem to have bitten but until it’s inked next week I won’t know if I left them in the copper sulphate long enough to get a good print from them.

 Moving on to the books. 

Both sides of the ‘pages’ in the book structure will be visible so I’ve been experimenting with colouring both sides of the paper.  I can get two books out of an A2 sheet. 

I’ve made plain using a palette knife

 And patterned using the gelli plate

 I thought the plain was too plain and decided to try out the structure with the patterned sheet. When I cut the page shapes out I came to the conclusion that I didn’t like the stripes with the circles. One of them had to go. 

The circle print was nice but it took several layers of cutting up stencils and peeling the stencils off the block because they kept sticking. OK for a one off but not for the 5 sheets I’ll need for an edition. So I overprinted the circles with a plainer texture to give a contrast of plain and patterned on the two sides of the paper.

And cut and folded. Trying to decide whether to have plain or patterned in the inside of the forms.

At this stage I was thinking that I’d stitch the two pieces together but then I wondered what would happen if I cut and slotted it together like I did with the mock ups. So I tried with some of the plain paper.

 I like the way the colour moves from the inside to the outside of the form (though I’m not sure about the holes). I need paper with some contrast between the two sides to accentuate this. I’ve cut strips from textured wallpaper to get some coherence between the pages of the edition and and I’ve started printing using different palettes.