Spring Haiku — an artist book I made in spring 1997. Covers of handmade paper with turnip greens inclusions, over matboard; Arches Text Wove for text. Oriental paper hinges, painted, cut into 3x-wide strips. Handmade paints — pure pigments plus gum arabic plus (in the case of Alizarin Violet) titanium-coated mica flakes for sparkle. The washes brushed with methyl cellulose — to improve the surface for fine (that is to say, small) lettering. The lettering was done with a #5 Mitchell dip pen.
Size: 2 1/2″ x 2 5/8″.
Uploaded to test software. Both photos are thumbnails to larger photos.
"Depth"
Here’s an artist I discovered through Illustration Friday. I just love her colors, shapes, symbols … everything.
Illustration Friday
Each Friday, the folks at Illustration Friday website propose a theme for illustration. And for the past two weeks I’ve enjoyed clicking through the 150+ artists who each contribute by illustrating on the topic and then linking back to the theme page at Illustration Friday.
What a variety of responses! It’s fascinating to page through them all.
Illustration Friday: Depth
My first submission to Illustration Friday is an artist book I did nearly 4 years ago. Click on the thumbnail above for a larger look. The text, an anonymous quotation, reads: “Man, despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication and many accomplishments, owes the fact of his existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”
I used this same text in the broadside done last month and uploaded to this blog on August 20.
Pop-up Galleries
Robert Sabuda, a creative pop-up book artist, has put together an inspirational website all about pop-ups.
The gallery of international pop-ups by country and artist is still growing. Click on the link below each country flag; sometimes clicking on the flags themselves gets you a 404 error message.
Guild of Book Workers’ Exhibition
A little inspiration — Abecedarium: An Exhibit of Alphabet Books.
And a terrible tease. A single image of a book gives you less information about that book than a trailer does for its movie. But whatcha gonna do? short of shooting a movie of someone turning the pages of the book, or somehow expropriating the Turning the Page software the British Museum. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/digitisation1.html
Pretty wonderful software.
A single image of a book is still better than nothing at all. After all, I’ve got single images of hundreds of books at my website.
The dogs days of summer
It’s hot.
Color in calligraphy
The thing that is absorbing me now is color in calligraphy. So many color courses are geared toward painting or landscaping, where the artist is dealing with fields of color. But in the case of most lettering, we are dealing with two colors: the letter color itself and the background upon which the letter lies.
(I should say: *at least* two colors. If the background is not a flat color, then the color or tint is changing. And whether the color of the lettering is flat or variegated, it is changing against a variegated background.)
And the letters must have at least enough contrast from the background to be read, unless you are simply making a calligraphic painting which is meant to be abstract or representational.
So how do these new parameters affect our study of color? I don’t know. I’m floundering about on this, and have been for awhile.
The solution for many calligraphers is to simply separate a color study from the lettering, as I did in the preceding little landscapes. There are other solutions, all with pitfalls.
Little landscapes
I’ve become enamored of these little tiny watercolor
— gouache, in this case —
landscapes.
Here is a small piece
(2″ x 4.5″).
A column of little landscapes
Here is a study I did last week. I started with the column of little landscapes, with no particular purpose in mind. Later, I added this quotation from Alexander McCall Smith’s book Portugese Irregular Verbs, amazed when, with no copyfitting or planning ahead, the length of the text fit the length of the column of paintings. This kind of fortuity doesn’t come along every day, or week, or even year.
I wanted to reproduce the feeling of texture engendered by the text itself, so I used no line spacing and tight letter spacing.
And here’s some detail:
