Christmas bookswap, Art at Burnley Harbour, Recipe and workshops

I have finished my books for Papermakers of Victoria's book swap and will post off this week before I go to Tassie, they are in the theme of my workshop too being quite sculptural. All made by pouring recycled pulp through a tin can with both ends removed. I then pressed lightly then rolled onto lace on fibro cement. I made the little bags the same way, getting two out of one A4 sheet.

The book can be hung from a Christmas tree.

In the last few weeks I have been working on a series of pulp paintings directly onto canvas, this one is for the exhibition at 69 Smith Street Gallery called Recipe (30 Nov to 18 Dec 2011) so includes the first couple of recipes from my falling apart PMWU basic cookbook.

Recipe ?

The other works are for the Contemporary Art Society exhibition Art at Burnley Harbour, December 2-4.

Vessel 3

Vessel 2

Vessel 1

Small vessel 1 (trial attaching paper and writing)

Small Vessel 2 (includes pineapple fibre as well as recycled)

In preparation for my Tassie workshop over the weekend I trialled doing solar printing with acrylic paints, I got some nice effects but also had problems with the things sticking to the paper. I have done it in the past very successfully using the paper dyes that I use for colouring my papers but since my notes said dyes or acrylic paints I thought I should try the acrylics. The method is to soak the paper (I used 130gsm cartridge) then tip off most of the water place flat things on and cover with plastic wrap the put in the sun to dry.

This is the back of a piece that was dried between two pieces of plastic wrap.

I used lace, leaves and a few plastic bits and pieces and am hiding all the spots where the paper came away with the items.

I had planned to pack for the workshop today since I'm out most of tomorrow at Women's Art Register then on Wednesday Yabbers is here and I'm going to be showing what I learned at Liz Powell's workshop the weekend before last. We won't have time to do the whole thing since the workshop was two very full days and we have less than a day but we can make a start. I liked the design process of continually simplifying the design. We started with a section of a photo that we drew up to twice the size and used the lines to form our key plate. Then we divided the plate into areas and made a collograph using different material for each area. Then we drew our collograph and carved it into lino using the different lino tools manipulated in different ways. then finally we made a jig saw on a fresh piece of lino using our last design.

The lino and collographs

The photograph and design

The prints, many still in progress

Four of my favourites, the idea is to overlay all four prints and gradually build up a multi coloured image, I found the registration quite tricky and the most I printed was three but I mostly preferred the single prints. I quite like the lower left which was the jigsaw with one of the collographs that stuck to the paper and pulled the colour away.

Today's solar prints, I'm really happy with this one, the paint was very thin when I put it on and it hardly stuck at all just a little bit where the larger circles are, that was a piece of rubber, the engine and the bus are flat glow in the dark toys that are plastic, the dots near the bottom are from a piece of lego and the letter A is wood.

The red wasn't quite as thin, I put more paint on and it stuck a bit to the star. So the trick is to use very thin acrylic paint. Now to get off the computer and pack a few things.