ArtiphyTheHeart

Little Pages

Most of my time is taken up with painting.  I work around a painting in layers, section by section.   While one section dries I work on another, then I go back and add more layers, fleshing it out.  This is slow, satisfying work.  I spend a lot of time thinking about it while I paint, and I take breaks often.  I love this slow work that takes a days, weeks, or months to complete.  But I also have a real need to finish something in a day for the pat-on-the-back that a sense of completion brings.  

This isn't the reason I work in a tiny collaged book that will morph into an art journal.  I do it because I love it, and because it provides a home for some very luscious snippets that really shouldn't end up in the dust bin.  But working in a tiny book does have the added benefit of quick accomplishment, especially when it's broken up into tasks, such as collage and paint today, embellish and journal on another day.  

Here are a couple of 2 page spreads from my tiny collage book.  They have a very unfinished look partly because they are unfinished, and partly because they haven't yet been sewn into book form.  Working this small, it's much easier for me to collage and embellish the pages, then sew and journal later.  If you click HERE, you can see a post that puts the size of these tiny pages into perspective.  The pages are 3" X 4-1/2".  The book is the one I'm holding in my hand in the first photo when you click the link, and also in the last photo when you scroll down. 

I've also been spending a lot of time reading.  I'm a big fan of Haruki Murakami, and I'm finding that his book1Q84 is unputdownable.  I work more smoothly when I'm in the middle of really good fiction.

And last but not least, there's a new post up on ArtiPhybers.  Click HERE and take a look.

X-Book

One of the first books you make when you study bookbinding is the X-Book.  It's simple, but its folding has a purpose that repeats with other more complicated bindings.  It's what I used to call a root book, since its construction is the basis for so many books.

Some of us in Artists Of the Round Table are working our way through Alicia Golden's bookMaking Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms.  We'll be making 100 books beginning with the X-Book.  Here are some pictures of mine:

It's made from a single sheet of paper that is cut and folded so that the middle puffs out.

It's easier to get the picture from the top.  Each fold is a page, and when the two end pages are pushed together toward the middle, it forms an X, which gives the book its name.

Then the outside folds of the X wrap around the inside folds to create the cover and the back.

Even if you made a gazillion of these in grade school, you make them still when you learn to bind books.  And it's amazing how easy it is to forget the simple stuff!

I decorated the pages with a combination of lettering, drawing, and clear stamps from Layers Of Colors, Close To My Heart, and Character Constructions.  

India ink and a Rapidograph coordinate perfectly with black VersaFine ink.  I added some of my own lines and quirks to the some of the stamped images, and it was impossible to tell where their lines left off and mine began.

Toys

Even when I was a child, I loved vintage toys.  I always preferred a vintage rag doll, a porcelain beauty, or a hand-carved pull-toy to most of the newest and most popular toys on the market.  I loved paper dolls, puppets with strings, and everything with simple to complex mechanical moving parts.  And if there was a way to make my own, even better!  I had my favorites. I was over the moon with Steiff originals, and I still am.

When our Affair With Art group challenged us to create something with movable parts, I was all over it in a flash!  I thought of all the wind-up toys I had, and fondly remembered my clockwork Organ Grinder and his Monkey.  Combining my love of paper dolls and the movement of the arms and legs of the fabulous Steiff animals, I used StampFrancisco's "Cymbal Monkey" stamp from Bartholomew's Ink to craft the trio pictured above.  

The assembly, in case you want to make one:  For each monkey made, three stamps must be printed.  The orignal stamp shows only a fraction of one leg, so it must be "built" from a scrap of the fully pictured leg, then glued into place.  This leaves only a partial torso from the leg which was cut.  Another of the same leg must be cut and hinged with a brad to a torso with the upper part of that leg still intact, thus the need for three prints.  Then it's just cut and glue, color, and assemble.

Some resources:  If you're interested in making toys that move, I've listed a few of my favorites.  I've seen them all and own a couple of them.  It always amazes me how easy it can be to make things that seem so complex once you have a good set of directions.  And after making a few things, you inevitably start to use that knowledge to design things of your own.  

Karakuri: How to Make Mechanical Paper Models That Move is a great book for making whimsical moving toys with paper and card stock.

Paper Puppet Palooza: Techniques for Making Moveable Art Figures and Paper Dolls is in my library, and I've used it as a resource for more than one project.

Making Shadow Puppets (Kids Can Do It) isn't just for kids.  There's a lot of basic information in this book that will translate into tons of your own original projects.

If you'd like to try your hand a making vintage toys out of wood, Turning Vintage Toys by Chris Reid is a great book with beautiful pictures and step-by-step instructions.  Even if you're not into wood, the photos in this book make it a great addition to any home or studio library.

Eight and Nine

Yesterday I decided to remake a page.  Actually, I do this almost every day.  It isn't about whether or not I like what's on the page, it's about putting what I happen to want on the page today, and reconciling that with what's already there.  I could start with a blank page.  In fact, I do that all the time.  I've heard people say that blank pages can be intimidating.  I've also heard people say that pages with too much stuff on them can be confusing.  Since I'm neither intimidated nor confused, it really doesn't matter to me whether the page is blank, or full.  Either way, to me it's a just substrate.  

Here's the semi-finished product--semi-finished, because it hasn't been written upon yet. The pages are really not wonderful until they've been written on, so this one still has a long way to go.

 The page was remade primarily with paint, and a pine tree that I drew and carved into a stamp several years ago.  "Road-tested" was clipped from a magazine and used as-is.  "High Altitude" was constructed from white rub-on letters on top of a piece of black magazine paper cut to fit the top. The road and date were drawn onto the page with a Rapidograph and Inda ink.  

For remade pages, much of the the beauty is simply that what's under the finished product lends so much to the final outcome, both texturally, and in meaning, that the page wouldn't at all have been the same if what's underneath hadn't been there in the first place.

 Here's what was underneath the page above when I started:

If you look closely, and maybe squint, you can see some of the dots and part of that smilely face underneath the finshed page.  I didn't remove a thing.  Even the brown grid tape was laid on top of the pink tape that was already there, which added to the color of the tape layer on top.  

I use art journals and sketchbooks to stretch my creative muscles.  Sometimes that means sketching out plans.  Sometimes it means glueing-in a lot of things that please me.  Things which might contain elements I'll want to use in a finished piece later.  Sometimes it's all about color, and making notes.  

This particular book was made for Mary Ann Moss's Full Tilt Boogie workshop, and I've been working in it since mid-summer.  I'm using it to stretch my conscious creative decision making.  I say conscious, because so many of the decisions we make are habitual and shortcut the thought process.  This book is full of pages patched together alongside full blank pages, alongside pages with other elements added.  If you'd like to see what the book looked like just after it was created and before I started working on the pages, there's a flip-through you can see by clicking HERE and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

Speaking of other elements, I drew some of those today to use later.  I've used quite a few frames on other pages of this book, and really like how they can be used to confine and define select words and design elements, so I drew a couple of funky frames with a wide-tipped Sharpie to have on hand for future pages, one on plain paper, and one on patterned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That takes care of Days 8 and 9 of Traci Bunker's 30 Days of Drawing.  A great incentive to keep pencil to paper, and to post about it.  It's not too late to join the challenge.

SDC-36

It has been ages since I answered a challenge, but today when I saw my friend Willy's beautiful page, and she mentioned the Stampotique Designers Challenge to alter a book page using Stampotique Stamps, I couldn't resist.  

I won't go into tons of boring detail, but suffice it to say that my relationship with Stampotique goes back a bit.  I made my first handbound book at a Stampotique workshop, and I've been making books ever since.  

For her 12th birthday, my daughter asked me if she and a handful of her more serious arty friends could do make 'n takes at Stampotique.  I was amazed, and so happy when Carol said "Yes".  Thanks to Carol and artist Amy Wilson Wellenstien, those kids seriously worked for an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon when the shop was usually closed, and came home with some wonderful completed projects.   The girls are 20 now, and still talk about how much fun they had!

So here's my altered page.  It's from a book on Bavaria, and I decided that Head, Bob, and their balloons needed to be in this picture.

If you're a fan of Stampotique Stamps, I'm sure you'll recognize the two Daniel Torrente stamps: "Head", and "Bob's In Time Out", as well as "Star Balloon" by artist Susan Mahoney.