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First Day of School

It’s another new beginning today: the first day of school.

I had thought to make naive letter forms, and partially succeeded. I failed mostly in that I could not bring myself to abandon the Roman capital proportions, and thoughtlessly (without thought) kept the verticals more heavily weighted than the horizontals.

But I was more interested in making letters that were difficult, awkward to make, required thought, were not automatic. In this I succeeded: I worked to keep the pen angle at 90 degrees to the stroke, which required a constant change of pen angle to the writing line. Very awkward to do.

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Epiphany

A quotation from Milton about epiphanies, on this day of Epiphany.

The red blob at the bottom of the page was the first mark on the paper, made when I leaned over to look past the board and my brush, held at the ready, connected with the paper in a most untimely manner. This is a signature of my journal, though, and so I continued on from that inauspicious first mark.

The illustration came from who-knows-where. I don’t know who the woman might be, or what the broom-like appendage signifies. That’s creativity for ya, eh?

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Journal – January 5

I’m reading The War of Art, by Steven Pressberg. It’s an empowering book, although I sometimes wonder at the pugilistic tone. The left side of the journal spread is a quotation from that book, about Somerset Maugham. The right side uses up the gouache that remained in a mysterious color palette that I don’t remember at all.

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Cloth-Covered Card Case

I always enjoy reading Denis Yuen’s blog, Cai Lun. En route to filing something else, I came across a saved bookmark to his tutorial on making a card case, or, as he calls it, a namecard holder. To a book artist who is guilty of carrying her cards in a rubberband, this seemed like a good project for today! Although his example places the side flaps on the bottom section of the structure, I placed mine on the center section.

I was pleased with the overall result, although I imagine that the only way to avoid stupid mistakes in construction is to make the structures often enough and enough times that I don’t have to stop and think about where to make the cuts.

Dennis’s instructions say to make the lining flaps a little larger than the cover flaps — and this is sound advice since it allows the trimming of the flaps after the lining and cover flaps are pasted together. But I found this problematic if too much leeway is allowed for, because there is that awkward intersection of center section and adjacent hinge and flap.

I used a green moire book cloth that is fairly unforgiving of paste-y fingers. The book cloth was left over from my final project last semester in photography class. And now I realize I never posted anything about that. Maybe I’ll post photos of that soon.

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Slot and Tab Book


Over at the Book Arts list on Yahoo, there’s currently a discussion about the slot-and-tab book structure. Carol blogged about the structure here when people asked her about the book in her blog header, and Celia posted her sample with instructions here.

I followed the instructions in Alisa Golden’s book, Creating Handmade Books. I’ve made many of the book structures in the book, but I had never tried this one before. I used scrapbook stock decorated with woodless colored pencils and water-soluble crayons — 8 sheets in 4 colors, with half decorated and half plain. Even with all these colors and patterns to help me keep it straight, I may not have attached the 2-sheet signatures to one another in a consistent manner. I’ll look at it again later when I have more time. I only had an hour for this today.

Some of the heavier tab papers were harder to curl through the slot papers without damaging. I imagine a strong, long-fiber paper like kozu paper would work well with this structure. It’s a great non-adhesive binding structure.

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A Walk in the Woods

I like to take our dog, Quixote, for a walk on the conservation easement near our house. The land is a pleasant combination of fields and woods, and this old barn is on the property. We went for romp yesterday afternoon. Q discovered a hawk dozing on a low limb, and there was some excitement for a bit. I took a lot of photographs, but the beautiful late-afternoon light proved difficult to translate in the lens. Here’s one of the more successful(ly Photoshopped) shots.

I photographed Quixote in the early morning in our barn. He’s a 9-month-old Leonberger.

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Happy New Year

Happy 2008! I’m looking forward to the new year. This month (I’ve given up on yearly resolutions) I plan to do something creative every day. I may not get to post every day, but I’ll do something creative every day and post it when I can.

Today I made this one-page book with pop-ups.
The text is from the Herman Hesse poem, “Stages”. My favorite part of the poem is not in this little book, but they are appropriate words for the new year:

In all beginnings dwells a magic force
For guarding us and helping us to live.

Although the structure is very simple and quick, it took me awhile because I decided to make the switch from Microsoft Publisher (2000) to CS2 InDesign. Since I got CS2 I haven’t wanted to upgrade my very old version of Publisher but have always been in too much of a hurry to figure out InDesign. It was fairly easy to pick up, although I’m that today sure I saw about 2% of what it can actually do.

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Black Tie Exchange

Finally … something calligraphic!!

Here are the 4 envelopes I mailed yesterday for the Black Tie Exchange over at the Yahoo group, Calligraphy Exchange. The rules: Use a black envelope and either white or gold “ink” address in calligraphy.

I made my envelopes out of Strathmore Artagain black paper — comes in a 9″ x 12″ pad. The two insert square are on Arches cover black, I think. I used my favorite gold ink — Dr. Martin’s Copper Plate Gold.

Names and addresses blurred to protect the innocent.

As usual, click on the image for a closer look.

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3D Design Project — Walking Stick

I haven’t been posting anything from my classes because I’ve been working on them right up until the due date, and once I turned them in they were in the classroom until the semester ended.

So I’ve got all this stuff in my studio that I don’t know what to do with. This walking stick was our penultimate project in 3D Design. We brought a 2×4 to class and then, after being shown most of the tools in the wood shop, we were told to work on that 2×4 until it was a walking stick. Many people’s sticks were all naturalistic and such — carved leaves and vines and so on. One very unusual one was a bright multi-colored syringe full of candy. Another very cool one was a sharpened stick with 3 carved fishes on it, as for a barbecue. Mine looks like a piece of furniture. I had fun on it, though.

I ripped my 2×4 into two 2×2’s so it would be square, then mitered the corners of square on the table saw. The knob at the top is 2 2×4’s glued together and then ground into a squared globe and doweled into the 2×2. Each section is a different experiment with the grinder or the drill or the Dremel or the band saw or the sander, or some combination of those.

I enjoyed the finish work: the rough sanding, the finer and finer hand sanding, the painting (cheap acrylic paints in the scrapbook aisle at Target) and the ebony stain over top that.

It’s a big image, but you’ve got to click on the thumbnail to see it properly.