"Artify": To make arty; To imbue and beautify with art. "Heart": The center or inner core of one's being. Thus, to "ArtiphyTheHeart" is to imbue the inner core of one's existance with the beauty of art.
I'm a curious and creative explorer of the world, currently working in book arts, collage, mixed media, fiber arts and acrylics. Each day I try to share a snippet of my life and musings through a piece of artwork, and every once in a while I spice it up with a pinch of practical wisdom.
Writers often use prompts and time limits to warm-up or unblock. I do much the same thing when I draw. I give myself a time limit. Usually 30 minutes. Then I pick a short story that I have already read, re-read a page or two, and illustrate what I've read. Roughly. Very roughly. I like to use panels, and I like to make the narrative part of each panel.
I rarely illustrate an entire story, but I do use a separate panel for each individual thought without skipping around or editing the text, even if I've chosen only a page or two.
The time limit keeps the sketches as ideas as opposed to artwork. Depicting ideas pictorially without the constraints of correct technique or finishing touches keeps the work clean and abstract. Mistakes are not considered mistakes. They are part of the exercise and stay put (note the two m's in Hemingway).
It's easier to move on to more sophisticated work when you begin with something clean and clear that helps you see instantly what to keep, what to add or replace, and what to throw away.
It's like warming up at the piano before a concert. My daughter plays, and she often warms up with the Goldberg Variations (see video below), playing them excruciatingly slowly at first, no matter how many times she has played them before. For me, this is similar to a piano warm-up, except that I keep it simple and quick by limiting my time and choices.
The first ten minutes of this page can be seen HERE. I finished it with multiple layers of collage and warmed it with an overstain of tinted walnut.
I keep a lot of different types of art journals, but I use my collage journals primarily as a means of exploring color, pattern, and composition. I have no problem combining unrelated materials, and I consciously try to mix whimsical mass-produced commercial elements and magazine pages with my own artwork and lettering. It's a playful, experimental dialogue between things from my hands with things from the hands of others. I work with these and other types of art journaling pages as a daily exercise, and they are for the most part, what I choose to share on this blog.
I plan to begin sharing more of my other work, maybe as soon as tomorrow. Not finished pieces of art. I don't put those on the web, and have no plan to ever do so. But I keep lots and lots of sketchbooks, and I have some favorite subjects that I revisit so frequently that they each have their own books. From time to time I think I'll pull pages from these sketchbooks and let you have a look.
But for now, today's page is enough. Feel free to click on the image and enlarge it so you can read what I've written. One of my favorite artists, Katherine Dunn, posted a quote from one of my favorite books yesterday on Facebook, and it fits the theme of this page so serindipitously. The quote is from Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez:
"He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over to give birth to themselves."
How appropriate, since the theme of my journaling deals with discarding childish ways, embracing adulthood, and growing ourselves as an on-going process that is not an angst-ridden death to play, but is instead, a liberating process of gaining new insights, refining abilities, developing talents, discovering endless new avenues of productive pleasures, and enjoying the increasing freedom that is earned when we choose to take adult responsibility as opposed to chaining ourselves to youthful pranks and displays of power.
To grow ourselves, we are indeed obiliged to give birth to ourselves over and over .
Some of the pages in my diary-style art journal are simply made up of random bits of stuff like doodles in a phone book. Doodling with everything: pens, markers, even the collage.
Sometimes these books end up a lot like the books in high school, when you doodled around the pictures and text in notebooks and then stuck stickers in the book and glued, stapled and taped stuff on top of it all. Totally unplanned. Spilling it all on the page for no other reason than to put it there. Nothing's really finished in these books, nor is it unfinished either. It's just there.
Perhaps what I've done with the pages of this book is more along the lines of K&Company Smash 365 Folio style. But I've been doing this for years and years and years in books I've made by hand, and Smash books are a new product that's partially already put together. With Smash books, you don't so much make it, as finish it. Still, I think they're a lot of fun, and I think I probably want one.
At any rate, the pages above are from the same book as the page in yesterday's post.
When I make books, I make so many books. So many radically different styles, bindings, and designs. Some are serious, some are whimsical, and some can't be catagorized at all, and they don't need to be. But sometimes it helps to have one book for one thing, and one book for another. Any way you look at it, it all adds up to lots of books. Containers, really. Containers of artistic expression. This book is a container for the doodles of my life, and most of those doodles are bits of collage.
I don't know if I'll post an "after" of this page. That will depend on what I write. These journals are for me and I write things which I'd like to re-read and remember, not things I want to cover up afterward or blur in Photoshop for the web, although I have done that on occasion.
I love working in the books that I've bound with sewn-on tapes. They aren't copic bound, but they lay flat when opened just like a copic stitched book. A delight. If you are interested in learning to bind these, click HERE. Mary Ann Moss teaches the binding as book one of her Full Tilt Boogie class. You can see the outside of my book and how I bound it by clicking HERE.
And on another subject, I have a book to recommend: The Encaustic Studio: A Wax Workshop in Mixed-Media Art by Daniella Woolf. I'm not an encaustic artist. I took a workship in college and I found that I really don't care for melting things, working with hot tools, etc. But this book is so very beautiful that even if you don't work in encaustic and aren't interested in learning it, it's still one of the most wonderful things you could add to your collection. There's much information inside about so many aspects of art aside from the wax work. And if you are interested in the medium, then wow, you need it! Beautifully written and beautifully presented.
Yesterday I showed you my first gelatin print and today I have a few more to share.
The first step in gelatin printing is inking up the gelatin plate. After that there are lots of things that can be done to make a printed image.
The print in yesterday's post was created by laying down a freehand cut image of a human figure on one half of the plate, then running lines and squiggles through the ink around it with a comb tool. The paper to be printed was then layed on top of the plate and hand-burnished until the image transfered successfully.
Later that night I freehand cut two more human figures. Then I cut some circles from a piece of cardstock which I notched with scissors, inked up my plate, layed down the pieces, and pulled this print:
Yesterday was my weekly art date with my friend Rita. I decided to take the cut figures and another experimental print to use in the journal I'd be working on. The pieces of cardstock I cut were actually layed into the paint, so the opposite side of these figures are covered with paint. I could have printed from them while the paint was wet, but I chose instead to let them dry and use them as I would a die cut in my art journal.
In the photo above, I layed one of the cut figures and two circles, one right side up and one upside down, on top of another print scrap then scanned the result so you could see what I'm talking about.
The photo above is the piece from my art journal. This is the left side of a two page spread. My book is too large to fit in the scanner opened out, so I'll show the pages one at a time. Here I've combined the figure cuts with another print and other collage material on the page.
And here is the right side of the two page journal spread using the figure you saw in yesterday's post as well as other pieces of collage material and another small print.
These are only the bare bones of my journal spread. So much more will be added, and maybe I'll show you the finished pages when they're complete, but for now I wanted to show what I did with the figures and a few collage elements on a blank page so you could see them clearly for what they are.
I love the texture and the color changes where the two colors met when the brayer carried the ink from bottom to top on the plate, and I love how clearly the cut figure picked this up.
If you're interested in printing and print making, I left a link for a great book in my post yesterday and today I'll give you another. This is not a new book, but it's really one of the best: Printmaking: History and Process. It is quite expensive, but most college libraries have copies on hand and if you're lucky, you might find one at your public library also. I checked my copy out from a local community college library and am working my way through it a little at a time, savoring every moment! ...And if you're inclined to give me a gift, this book would top my list!
This evening was the final teleconference for the Creating Time Mega Event launching the book Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life by Marney Makridakis. I've attended all three, and I must say that I've had more fun, met more people, and been introduced to more new books and websites than in any other webinar I've taken part in.
In each of the three events, we've doodled clocks. Instructions were to take moments instead of taking notes. So I recorded the pregnant pauses as well as the salient points while I looked for the metaphors. I listened intently, watched a video, composed a group poem, and adjourned to small groups twice for discussions. All this over a period of an hour and a half, all the while doodling my clock and taking notes moments.
At the end of the webinar, I was surprised. I really hadn't looked at the paper I was doodling on in the process. I was on autopilot, expanding time by layering my activity, my attention heightened and present for listening, moment taking, doodling, and coloring, all at once and equally present, all happing at once within the same moment in time.
Who says time isn't pliable as putty? Here's what I discovered I had done by the end of the evening: Not a piece of art, but a cohesive collection of ideas, colors, pattern, and metaphor. A surprising outcome for someone who was present in so many places at the time the drawing was taking place.
Quite different from multi-tasking, this was a free act of letting the hand do it's work while the brain watched and listened. The words "Creating Time" and the date were added afterward. Everything else was done while participating in the event.
So I wanted to take the time to share this with you, and let you know that I highly recommend the book, Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life. It's filled with insights, activities and wisdom from the more than 80 artists, creatives, authors and other luminaries who contributed to this effort. Yesterday was its release date on amazon.com and it hit #1 in sales in numerous categories. I'm not surprised.
If you're interested -- and who wouldn't be? -- in celebration of the book's overwhelming success on it's first day of release, the special offer I mentioned in yesterday's post has been extended until April 24. You can find out more by clicking HERE to read yesterday's blog post, or by clicking HERE to sign up for the offer itself. There are more than $125 worth of fabulous and absolutely free items and perks, just for buying a book you'd want to own anyway. I know, because I took advantage of it and spent hours downloading all the fabulous morsels and tidbits, which include e-books, online courses, audio recordings and more. Really. What are you waiting for? This isn't a sales pitch, it's my own personal opinion. As they say, you snooze, you loose, so go for it!
WOW! Marney Makridakis of Artella has put together a package of freebies worth more than $125!
This post is not an advertisment. It's a public service to creatives everywhere! I just hope I'm not too late in posting for you to take advantage of this amazing package of goodies!
To get the more than $125 worth of freebies, the book must be ordered on the release date--TODAY! I have been excited about this book since I first heard about it last December, and I have mentioned it in past blog posts. But call me skeptical, I wanted to see for myself what was in the free package of goodies before I urged you all to place your orders on the 17th of April -- Today -- so I decided to place my own order first, open my package of goodies, then decide whether or not to pass along the information. I've been saving an Amazon gift card just for this very purchase, so it was great to find out that in order to get the freebies, the order must be placed online with either Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
I'm not going to list everything that is in the package of goodies because I think it's meant to be a surprise, but suffice it to say that there are audio recordings, full length online classes, and more. If you're interested in art, writing, or otherwise engaged in right-brain creative activities, this is SO generous, and SO worth it! And all for the cost of a book you'd want to buy anyway. At least I couldn't wait to buy it!
I rarely tell you to go out and get something, so today is really special. Just don't wait. Offer ends at midnight!
P.S. I get nothing extra for passing along this information. As I said at the beginning of my post, this is a public service, not an advertisement. But if you do decide to order, please consider using the links to the books that I've provided within this post, because I do get credit from Amazon if you place your order directly from clicking the Amazon links in this blog post. Then go back to the link on this page to the form and type in your Amazon order number. Thanks! You won't be disappointed!
Monday marked the official start of Creating Time, a mega event that you can learn more about and even join for free by clicking the link on my right sidebar. Part of this event is the featured launch of a new book by Marney Makridakis of Artella: Creating Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life. I've been anxiously awaiting the release of this book for ages, and I can't wait till a copy is in my hands!
Every day throughout this event a new exercise in seeing, thinking about, and experiencing time in unique and potent ways is presented to each of the participants. Monday's activity focused on answering a list of questions about time specifically and in general, culminating with an art project to illustrate the essence gleaned through the process. You can see mine in a minute.
But first, before I share the journal page I did for this project, I'd like you to take a few seconds and watch this snippet of a video I put together with watches from various magazine ads. And I want you to notice. Notice what? Well, that's what you have to figure out. What do you see? Don't scroll down till you've watched or you'll spoil what may be a surprising fact.
Ok, now that you've watched, did you notice anything unique? Unusual? Different? Similar? Surprising? Or perhaps even suspicious?
Before I tell you what I noticed and what it means, let me share my journal page for Monday's Creating Time, Day 1, and tell you a little bit about it.
The first thing I did was to sketch my little drawing of someone (me, perhaps?) laid-out flat in her efforts to uphold time. She has to keep time balanced while the clock is ticking without letting it crush her in the process. Sound familiar? I'm sure we all feel this way at times.
Next, I found the clock image I wanted to use. I could have drawn it. It would have taken less time and effort, but I wanted the contrast and interplay that comes from using multiple types of images in collage. I found a few other parts of pages in magazines that caught my eye, so I ripped them out too. Then I decided which journal to use.
I keep several "open" (aka: ready for use) journals of different shapes and sizes available at any given time. One of the benefits of this is that there is always something on hand, ready to accomodate any size page that a combination of images will dictate. This way the artwork is king, not the size and shape of the page. I grabbed the journal that best suited the project, and started arranging and re-arranging the components until I came up with a pleasing composition, then I glued them down.
All the while, I kept my answers to the time questions in front of me so that my answers stayed in the back of my mind throughout the selection and arrangement process. When everything was on the page, I took a break, had a cup of tea, then came back and took a look. The page contained all my answers, and more. It showed me things I hadn't thought of while answering the questions. Things that were just as pertinent, perhaps even more. So I began to write. First a thought here, then a thought there, then another over in that corner, and also one right here at the side. My thoughts flowed onto the page, becoming commentary on my perceptions of time.
And now, back to the video. I was searching for clock face images when I happened across the watches I clipped for the video. I wanted a clock face or two to add to my little drawing. I kept finding images of diamond watches, artsy clock faces, and unusual artistic shapes when all I wanted was something clear and the proper size for my drawing, but I decided to cut them all out as I went through the magzines and sort them later.
As I clipped, I noticed that all the watches were set to the same time. 10:10. I looked through another magazine. Same thing. 10:10, regardless of brand. I started to Google "watches set to 10:10". The minute I typed-in "watches", the words "set at 10:10" automatically popped up in the search. Apparently lots of people know this. My husband knew it when I asked him about it. You probably already know it too. I would have thought that I would have known it, having worked in advertising, but then I never did a clock or watch ad, or worked for anyone who carried those accounts. Here's the deal: 10:10 is an industry standard. When watches and clocks are used in advertisments, setting them at 10:10 puts the hands in the best position to frame the name of the maufacturer. It's easiest to read "Timex" or "Rolex" when the hands are set at 10:10.
So there you have it. Now you can say: "I knew that!" Or, you can say, "Wow! I never knew that." Or you can get your friends to watch my little video and ask them what they see. If you have the time, of course.
When I work in paint, collage, or any other fine art medium, I'm very aware of the stages I go through from concept to finished product. Personally, I usually start with a vision of the composition of a whole, even if I'm working section by section and letting the piece develop into itself without a fixed concept. That way, I can work out the lights and darks, and the placement of shapes and their relationships to one another. Here are a couple of examples of collage where I did just that.
Both this piece and the piece of collage below were created for Revel In The Moment. In this first piece, I was more concerned with the placement of the shapes of the paper pieces, the balance of lights and darks, and they way the colors harmonized more than the theme. When I started out, I knew I wanted to combine a black and white image or two and a variety of some interesting textures in an analogous color scheme. I chose to work with green/blue/purple and purple's compliment of yellow. Mostly this was done without thinking about it, or consciously considering more than what was pleasing when placed side by side or juxtaposed.
This piece was begun with two thoughts in mind: The use of two moons, and the layering of pattern and color. My eye was drawn to another analogous set of colors, yellow/orange/green/blue, all with similar values, so the black and white provided the high contrast necessary to deliniate the moons as focal images as opposed to just another set of items stuck onto the page. In this piece more than the one on top, imagination needed to be moved from its abstract mental image to an image of an imaginative reality before I could translate it to the page. The two moons are a central theme in Haruki Murakami's book1Q84 which I am currently reading, and I created an abstract thought of using them creatively in collage. Because two moons do not exist in the reality of our world, I could not go out and draw them from life, or re-create them from a memory of real life. I had to create a reality for them in my imagination, visualize that reality and really see it in my mind's eye, before I could begin to work to translate my imagined reality to the page. In the end, I chose to use dual stamped images of the moon rather than drawing new moons, as a contrast to the drawn look of the handwritten script already on the page.
It occurred to me that the way I filter what I see in an imagined image is very similar to the way the eye filters an image in reality. Some things are brought to the forefront while others recede to the background or blur in the periphery. And it got me thinking about relationships between the way I work with collage and the way I work with digital images.
I'm really interested in the way other artists photograph their work and the way websites in general display photos. Personally, although au courant web consultants will tell you to pull a thousand and one arty tricks from your sleeve and display them all in the same six ways, I still prefer the straight forward gallery approach to photographing and displaying my work on the web, with clear, reality based color and content. But I'm a fad-hater. And I've noticed that from one generation to the next, what becomes very popular today, even if it's lovely and in good taste, will often be picked up by so many copycats that it loses its appeal, and often its meaning, as well. Much like worn out records overplayed by disc jockeys from playlists limited to the 15 top rated songs.
I've also spent a lot of years observing consultants and advisors run companies into the ground by forcing the latest and the greatest out of the box trends and techniques on management in order to get the desired response from the paranoid stockholders who hire them, and who know and care very little about anything other than nervously holding on to their purses. And I've watched this backfire, over and over and over and over again. So while I prefer a realistic gallery of portraits of my work on the web, keep in mind that my work on the web is often far from a collection of portraits of realism. I like portray the items from my imagination as I've created them, in realistic pics on the web.
I am in no way an ace photographer and I ask for help quite often from my professional photographer friends. But I have acquired a pretty awesome set of Photoshop skills over the years. I've written some powerful Photoshop actions, and I've developed some special brushes, blends, and filters of my own. I thank lynda.com tutorials for some of this knowledge, but when it comes right down to it, a few pieces of sage advice, some drawing skill, and a working knowledge of vector drawing programs like Adobe illustrator have been the key combination for my sucess with photo edits. Sometimes these skills are used to make a poorly shot photo look more like the real article being photographed. Other times, they're used for digital imaging and digital collage. In either case, there is an indespensable skill set to be acquired.
Topping the list of skills that are worth taking the time to master, first and foremost, is gaining a working knowledge of the host of selection tools, pracitce, and mastering the art of selection in as short a time as possible. The truth of truths is: The more acucrate your selections, the better everything turns out, every time.
Also on the success list is mastery of:
A good sense of color identification and color matching
A good sense of light and value
Seeing accurately, and developing your eye so that you are able to see what's really there, by overriding the eye's natural filters. Being able to quickly tell the difference between what your eye tells you--what it wants you to think you see--as opposed to what's really there, is key
Reality matching
If good selections top the list, then achieving reality by matching reality is the skill that combines and unites them all. If you have this skill, then you'll always be able to move into an artistic direction with filters and color changes, and also with collage, painting, and fine art and photography in general.
You may think that reality and imagination are at opposite ends of the pole, but paradoxically, you can't use the images that your imagination wants to create until you've mastered reality. Imagination and reality are not polar opposites, they are two sides of the same coin, and the coin doesn't exist with only one side. If imagination is a vision of the destination, then reality is the vehicle that gets you there. Reality takes you to the place your imagination envisions, because once you have a vision, you have to execute that vision from the reality of the material your imagination has conjured. You can do this only if you have mastered reality matching. You need to be able to visualize the dream of your imagination, capture the reality of that imaginary image, match it in your consciousness, and then replicate it. Whether your canvas is digital or on your easel, the reality of your imagination must be captured and translated onto your chosen substrate to move from concept to artistic reality.
And vise-versa. While I employ reality matching from imagination to collage, I employ the same principals in reverse when I shoot a photo of my work that doesn't look like the piece in reality. I take the photo backwards from its unreality, photoshopping it back into what it looks like in real life so that I can display as accurate an image as possible on the web. And indespensable skill when you shoot with a cheap camera, lack basic photography skills, or both.
We skipped a week, so it was doubly great to get together yesterday with my art pal Rita. I'd look up from my collage every once in awhile to take a peek at the detailed feathers of the rooster she was busy drawing with her Rapidograph. Absolutely gorgeous! I hope she decides to post it so I can link to it and show you!
While Rita was drawing, I managed to collage two more pages in the book I bound for Revel In The Moment. Bear in mind that these are raw pages, just the collage, and any paint, pen work, lettering or other marks and color will come later.
While I usually work finished page by finished page, my plan for this book is a little different. Each page will be collaged until the book is full. I'll do either a flip video or a slide presentation of the book as collage, and not post that till the entire book is finished. When I finish the book, page by page, I'll film a second video or slide and present both of these back-to-back in a blog post. It will take awhile. I work slowly, and this book is one I relax with in between other projects, so prepare to wait. Just letting you know that it's what I have in mind -- down the road a bit.
When Rita and I work together, we field journal. This means that we pack our bags with random supplies plus a few planned essentials and work with what we've brought. The little league collage came together entirely by itself. The only thing I decided upon to begin with was the image of the boy with the mit on his bat and the overall composition. Other than that, I used what I grabbed from my bag. These elements very serendipitously turned out to include a report card, a ticket, a blank check, and a measuring scale. I chose them for color, size and shape to fit the composition, not for content. That they seem to go together in story form is purely accidental. Sometimes these accidents happen and it's really fun and even a bit of a shock to step back from what you've created and see what's happened on your page.
I usually love what I'm doing, but sometimes it doesn't turn out that way. Sometimes I wrestle with a page and really struggle with it. This was one of those pages, and like most things I struggle with and am sure I'm going to hate, I came away loving this piece. You can see where I (unintentionally) distressed the page by ripping off what had been glued down. What you see is not at all what I started with, but I chose to leave the scuff marks and residual scratches and stray bits of previous glueings in place after deconstructing about half of it, then moving on. I wasn't happy until I added the bit of Hambly transparency. Repetition of the center circle and the grid of the plaid finally made it harmonize. I didn't think that out. I added what I thought it needed, where I thought it needed it, and noticed afterward that I was pleased.
Whenever I hate something or love something, I always ask myself why. Not to question myself, but to learn more about my own choices, why some work and others don't. The answer almost always has to do with a design principle that was either followed instinctively, or artfully broken.
I've mentioned before that I'm an avid reader, and that I find that my art suffers a bit when I'm not in the middle of a good work of fiction. My literary tastes are all over the place. I'm very eclectic when it comes to subject matter, just as long as the book is very, very well written. Right now I'm savoring Haruki Murakami's1Q84. It has a really meaty plot line which is revealed bit by bit through a cast of characters with very diverse and interesting lives who are presented alternatively throughout the book. I'm loving this book, and I'm taking my time with it.
But I also like quick, fun reads that tell a good story. Just before I picked up 1Q84, I finished Sara Addison Allen's third book,The Girl Who Chased the Moon: A Novel. This one took me only two days, and delighted me to no end. Very unlike 1Q84 in weight of material, but equally satisfiying. I had read Allen's first two books, and was ready to jump into the next. It did not disappoint.
I love it when bloggers I follow give book suggestions, so if your blog regularly includes a book choice or two, please include a link in a comment so I can go take a look!
Moving right along, making 100 books this year with Artists Of The Round Table, the third book on the list is the X-Book with pockets.
This book is constructed like the first X-Book which you can see by clicking HERE, with the addition of a simple cover and pocketed pages. Notice the arrows which I've drawn on the pic at the top. The cover is glued to the book only at the point of the 3/8" wrap around on the first and last pages of the book. The arrows point to the open area where the cover is not attached to the book. This is significant, because with a single sheet of paper folded into eight sections with pockets, and six of these exposed as book pages, the other two are hidden behind the cover. So you end up with a book of six visible pockets, and two hidden ones.
Stretch out the cover from the back of the book, and a hidden area with secret pockets is revealed. I slipped in a couple of plain tags to highlight the pockets. The arrow points to the secret hiding place.
Once again, if you're interested in any of the books I'm making, or if you're interested in bookbinding in general, pick up a copy ofMaking Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms by Alisa Golden. It's a great book, and the one we're using for this ambitious project.
If the first handful of books in my posts strike you as a bit on the simple side, let me assure you that each contains valuable elements crucial to some of the most sophisticated bindings. Simple perhaps, but not simplistic. The steps we are taking and the order in which they are taken provide an increasing bank of information, with each of the steps building upon the next for a comprehensive enclyclopedia of knowledge in making books and binding them. Each book, even those that seem the most simple, contain cuts, folds, and steps in construction that form the basis of many of the more complicated structures. So stick around! I'll be getting to some of those shortly!
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.
Here's another first book for those who are learning bookbinding. Once again, even though I've made these in the past, I'm so glad to have the refresher course because there's so much I'd forgotten. I had to ask for clarification that my page-turning was in the correct order, but it turns out that I got it right.
This is another book constructed from a single sheet of paper. I used 98# Canson mixed-media paper, a heavier weight for this book than the last because there were fewer folds, and I didn't want the watercolor and ink to bleed through the pages. It worked. I prepared the paper by spraying a light solution of gouache over a few of stencils on both sides. I ground some ink and used the wet side of a sheet of sumi-é paper to make a few brush sketches. When I realized that I had done nine cats, I got the idea for Nine Lives.
The cats were randomly sketched all over the paper, so I tore them out and added some gouache to the edges. Pages three and four open up and down. There are four folds and two sides, so eight pages in all. I decided to use these up and down pages to add the ninth cat.
The chop I used says "long life". It's a traditional chop carved from soap stone and I inked it with the traditional toxic red chop ink that takes forever to dry. I zapped it with a hairdryer to speed things up, but I think it will take the full few weeks before it sets, regardless. In the meantime, I blotted it a bit, then separated the pages with waxed paper.
If you'd like to see all posts of the books I'm making for this project, scroll up to the top of this page, click on "Archives", then click on "Making Handmade Books Workshop" from the category menu.
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!
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.
My friend and art partner Rita loves Canson mixed-media paper and in watching her work with it, I've noticed how well it takes wet media and glue without buckling. It's also smooth and bright white which I like for most drawing and illustration work. It holds its fibers and keeps them out of my Rapidograph, so it's the paper I chose for the signatures in this book.
I wanted the spine to harmonize seamlessly with my painted canvas covers. I found patterned paper that worked well for this purpose, cut 1" wide strips and glued them to the spine of the outside folio of each signature. More than just aesthetic, this adds bulk to the spine so the book will close flat even after media is added. And because I glued the outside signature of each folio to the next outside signature as each was sewn, the decorative spines are present only on the outside of the book, not the inside, providing me with a book of pure white pages.
Cover:
I cut museum board to size and painted the canvas to cover the boards with multiple layers of thinned, transparent acrylics. This was my first time using commercial modeling (or molding, depending on the brand you use) paste. I tinted it first, then spackled it over a stencil of squares using a palette knife, lifted the stencil and left it to dry for a couple of days. I liked the texture, so I left it as-is instead of sanding it to a smooth finish, then I adjusted the color.
Spine:
A more detailed view of the spine shows the book with the back cover, and a closer view of the tapes. I haven't decided whether or not I'll go back in with a little walnut ink to cover the exposed white edges of the holes for the stitching.
Tapes:
The tapes began as end strips of upholstery fabric which were chosen for their color alone, as pictured (right). But after prepping the strips for book tapes, I realized that the color was a bit off. The left strip in the picture is the fabric before sewing. To correct this, I randomly and haphazardly machine stitched over the tape with a copper brown thread. The middle tape in the picture illustrates the tapes at this stage. To coordinate with the color of the covers and the spine, I added a powdery teal thread, and kept adding copper and teal threads alternatively until I felt that the fibers gave the fabric the color it needed to harmonize effectively. The end product is the third tape on the right.
Construction:
I constructed the book as part of a project in the Affair With Art group I belong to. Nancy wrote a set of beautiful instructions for us and posted them to her blog HERE. Her instructions called for leather tapes and a closure, but I preferred to use what I had on hand. I also tweaked the instructions a bit and bound the book per the specs for book #1 of Full Tilt Boogie, a perpetual online workshop, which I highly recommend, given by Mary Ann Moss. The end product looks similar to the AAWA book, but differs just a bit in the way it was put together and the materials used.
Inside Cover:
I really wanted to use the same paper I cut for the spine, as endpapers inside the book. But with more than one signature, I had to come up with a way to attach a single sheet of paper to the front of the first signature and to the back of the last. It worked because of the strips I attached to the spines of those signatures. I simply glued these pages to the inside of the strip in such a way that the wrong side of the paper faced outward. The signature then had one additional piece of paper, which after the book was sewn, was glued wrong-side-down to the inside cover as an endpaper. When the book is opened, it looks like this:
I mentioned in an earlier post that I'll be binding 100 books in 2012 with the Artists Of The Round Table. Making Handmade Books: 100+ Bindings, Structures & Forms by Alisa Golden, is the book we are using. If you are interested in hand binding books, you'll want to add this to your library!
Not too long ago, Diana Trout published her book: 
style. But I've been doing this for years and years and years in books I've made by hand, and Smash books are a new product that's partially already put together. With Smash books, you don't so much make it, as finish it. Still, I think they're a lot of fun, and I think I probably want one.
. I'm not an encaustic artist. I took a workship in college and I found that I really don't care for melting things, working with hot tools, etc. But this book is so very beautiful that even if you don't work in encaustic and aren't interested in learning it, it's still one of the most wonderful things you could add to your collection. There's much information inside about so many aspects of art aside from the wax work. And if you are interested in the medium, then wow, you need it! Beautifully written and beautifully presented.
by Marney Makridakis. I've attended all three, and I must say that I've had more fun, met more people, and been introduced to more new books and websites than in any other webinar I've taken part in. 
, and
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which I am currently reading, and I created an abstract thought of using them creatively in collage. Because two moons do not exist in the reality of our world, I could not go out and draw them from life, or re-create them from a memory of real life. I had to create a reality for them in my imagination, visualize that reality and really see it in my mind's eye, before I could begin to work to translate my imagined reality to the page. In the end, I chose to use dual stamped images of the moon rather than drawing new moons, as a contrast to the drawn look of the handwritten script already on the page.
. This one took me only two days, and delighted me to no end. Very unlike 1Q84 in weight of material, but equally satisfiying. I had read Allen's first two books, and was ready to jump into the next. It did not disappoint.
by Alisa Golden. It's a great book, and the one we're using for this ambitious project. 
