Sculptural Books Workshop, shaped book and cover

I am teaching a workshop in making sculptural books next week and thought that participants might be interested in making and coving a book with shaped pages. I also decided to set up the pages for sketching by pre treating with some coffee and dilute acrylic paint. I cut the pages from 130gsm cartridge paper, here they are laid out ready for painting.

I dipped some cotton thread in the paints to get a different effect on some of the pages and I used the threads to bind the book.

Here are the pages drying.

And the covers, covered with some scraper paper (another example for the class).

I made pockets inside the covers for bibs and bobs (and leftover scraps of decorated paper)

Then sewed with double needle Coptic stitch using the acrylic coloured threads that I waxed by pulling through a slab of beeswax.

Bugs and Books

This coming Tuesday I am heading to Clunes for a Bug Blitz Day. The whole of Clunes Primary School will be participating in various nature activities like biodiversity assessment, honey tasting, bird watching, aboriginal knowledge and papermaking. Since the theme is bugs I decided to make some new buggy stencils for pulp painting, I hope they're not too freaked out by centipedes and spiders!!!

Last week I picked up some papers for recycling and discovered lots of envelopes and matching paper for cards and since I'm right out of cards I decided it was time to get a few made. I already had lots of cast squares that I'd decorated in different ways (workshop samples from a couple of years ago!), so I combined then with some squares of hanji and here are a few.

Box Hill Community Arts Centre has its annual discarded exhibition starting in a week or two and since the sub theme this year is Paper Cuts I felt I should participate. I traipsed around the suburbs taking photos of hard and garden rubbish noticing just how many televisions were on nature strips so I decided to make a tunnel book, I made the paper from mixed plant fibre (garden waste!) and printed the photos and text on. Here are a few pics. I called the book 'Obsolete'.

Artist Book Workshop- Accordion Play

Here are some photos of the works produced by the very talented participants of the workshop held in the heat of last weekend. The workshop was organised by the Leongatha Arts and Crafts Society as a stimulus for Liberated Books their forthcoming Artist Book Competition and Exhibition celebrating their 40th Anniversary. See the website http://leongathagallery.org.au/ for details on how to apply.

more workshop samples

The plan is to start the class ( Accordion Play at Meeniyan 24 Feb) with a straight accordion but I worked on this one by adding some popups, the covers are some paste paper on brown paper, Last time I made paste paper I did it on brown paper then at the end of the day spread the paste all over and combed it. It makes really good book covers.

This one isn't for the workshop, it is one of my standard Celtic Bindings, the grey thread is hemp, the black is knitting cotton and the paper is some I made for another project but it's recycled silver paper and black card double dipped.

Another workshop sample, this one is playing with different ways of adding extra paper. I had the straight concertina already, a sample from another workshop, the cover is Kenaf and dyed gingerlily paper pulp painting and the pages are hahnemuhle, the extra bits are cover paper. This one has the coloured bits threaded through vertical slits in the concertina, the two concertinas are the same width.

This one has horizontal slits cut to make popups and the coloured bits fit into the valleys of the popups. This was described in Peter and Donna Thomas' Book More Making Books by Hand, quarry Books 2004

workshop prep

I am making some mock ups for the workshop that I'm teaching at Meeniyan on creating artists books based around the Concertina. We'll start with a straight concertina then do another book or two that incorporate a concertina of some sort. I'm giving everyone a set of photos to make a flag book so thought I'd better make a sample. I selected a group of photos taken at the same time of rocky beach and cliffs, I loved the light in these images.

The white backs of the photos looked a bit dull so I made up a haiku to fit (seven backs and seven words in the haiku, perfect!)

Seaside walk,

One summer's night,

shadows play

These pictures are of a very painful experiment, many hours cutting through photo and watercolour paper, ouch! When I was in Hobart last year I saw an exhibition where there were a series of tunnel books but they were just concertinas so I thought I'd try it with a couple of photos and here are the results. To view them properly you need to be on the same level as the book, but they sort of work.