Visiting The Studio West End

On Tuesday I met up with three other Brisbane members of Book*Art*Object for a bit of a pre-Christmas get-together. Robin Foster, Helen Malone, Jack Oudyn and I decided to check out the end of year exhibition at The Studio West End, before lunch.

The Studio is the domain of Adele Outteridge and Wim de Vos, and is where I learned to do coptic, celtic and other bindings in 2009. Adele and Wim offer classes and on-going support to their students, including opportunities like the exhibition we went to see, Bookplates Unbound and Artists Books.

Adele and Wim welcomed us warmly and Del was kind enough to allow me to take some photos of the show to share with you.

The bookplates showed great variety and there were some beautiful prints amongst them.

The artists books explored a range of media and structures. I recognized some Impress Printmakers' members names amongst the participants, including the very talented Glenda Orr.

This work by Susan Bowers, Standing Stories 4,5 (Bush women) is a lovely example of pushing the definition of a book.

Wim de Vos showed his current obsession, perspex tunnel books. This one is inspired by the Chrysler Building, and offers an interior view that I had not seen before.

Adele shared examples of book bindings that students can make in her classes. These lovely ones in the lower left which combine coptic, celtic, the icicle and the caterpillar are exemplars completed in a single workshop, to allow students to try all these different bindings in one go. What a great idea! Reminds me of something......

We all enjoyed the exhibition and our visit to the studio, and I enjoyed the chance to see Del and Wim again. If you'd like to see more of the Studio West End exhibition, Del tells me there will be more photos going up on their website soon.

Making “The Great Library”, Part 1: Inside

From my first reading of the Art & Lies extract by Jeanette Winterson, I wanted to depict the boys in their eyries.

Initially, I planned to make a varied edition of altered books and I progressed as far as buying Condensed Readers Digest books in sufficient numbers, before I realized the difficulty of hand-carving hundreds of pages over and over to make the edition. Fortunately, another structure came to mind.

The Structure

At Ed Hutchins’ Single Sheet Structures workshop, a couple of years ago, I learned about the story box. It’s a simple structure that can be very effective when it supports the concept, and in this case it was perfect. With the image of the eyries in my head, I plunged into working on the inside of the box.

Inside

For this edition, I really wanted the warmth of a hand-pulled print, despite having more experience with digital printmaking. Having only made a couple of etchings before, I chose to do the inside image of the library as a drypoint on a Perspex (acrylic) plate, 30cm x 42cm. I did not want to make a large acid-etched plate in case it wasn’t successful.

Below you can see the plate now.

To inscribe it I used two drypoint tools, which you can see too.The one with the wooden shaft is an inexpensive diamond point from Dick Blick. The diamond makes an incredible difference in the pressure you have to apply. I’m not sure whether this particular tool will last very long, but if not I’ll certainly be replacing it with another diamond point. If anyone has a favourite tool for drypoint they recommend, please do let me know.

Digital Background

I found this lovely photo (above) of the book stacks at the British Library by Steve Cadman on flickr. It was the inspiration for the colours I initially prepared for the background of my print, using acrylic inks (below left).

Right: In progress, showing lightened areas in two places

I scanned the background and planned to create areas where the eyries would be positioned using the “lighting effects” in Photoshop. Obviously, this darkens those areas of the print that you haven’t chosen to be “lightened”.

In case you haven’t used this, you just go to:

Filter>Render>Lighting Effects.

There are a lot of options, but a good place to start is with either Omni or Spotlight (found in the Light Type window). From there you can play about with intensity and narrow or wide focus. It maybe useful to adjust the “exposure” and/or “ambience”, which can be found under Properties. I’ve found these to be the most fundamental controls to achieving simple but effective lighting effects. Beyond that, you can spend hours playing to see what can be done.

Combining the Digital and Drypoint Prints

In total I created five “lightened eyries”, which showed up quite nicely, but the background was now looking rather dark and dull. I altered the saturation and colour balance until the background printed on the Rives BFK printmaking paper to my taste. As this isn’t a paper for inkjet printing, there aren’t any colour profiles online, so I had to make numerous small test prints on the actual paper in order to see the colours.

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Left is the final background, as the file appears on-screen. Right, a scan of the artists’ proof (drypoint over digital background on Rives BFK).

More next time!

Hello from Melbourne!

 

Window at Heide Art Museum (detail)

I’ve been in Melbourne a week already and it’s great to be here.

We are spending two weeks here, the first entirely holiday, and during the second I’ll be trying to attend as much of the 4 day Impact International Printmakers Conference as I can. Although I can’t make any claim to being a printmaker, there are two streams which I hope to attend:- the one about artists books and the other on digital printmaking.

The entire collection of Book*Art*Object books from both editions so far is to be displayed on Monash campus, where the conference is being held, which will give the group and the work high visibility. As well, there are a huge number of artists book and print-related exhibitions on in Melbourne this month, all timed to coincide with the conference.

The conference starts tomorrow (Tuesday) and the hard-working Ronnie has already installed our work in its display cases at Monash campus. Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to rest up today in the hope of getting along to all the stuff I’ve circled in my conference programme!

If you’re interested in following some of the conference action online, head over to the Book*Art*Object blog. Together with Ronnie, Sara and Caren, I will be blogging from the conference, hopefully even “live” at times, as we have all armed ourselves with the appropriate apps for blogging from our mobile (cell) phones.

SEE YOU THERE!