children making books

A bit last-minute, but there's still time to book your creative youngster into a totally awesome class every Saturday afternoon in May, learning how to write, storyboard and draw your own illustrated book.

Featuring the amazing talents of burgeoning illustrator Annika Romeyn (you will know that name in a few years) and roping in my kid-wrangling bookbinding skillz, the class will use the SLV's travelling exhibition LOOK! The Art of Australian Picture Books Today (showing at CMAG right now) as a resource and make their own incredible works.

Your child will learn SO MUCH from Annika. Get thee hence to the CMAG website and at the very least put yourself on their mailing list, because they offer so much to the ACT community. Please pass on this info to anyone who might be interested.

Rare Book Summer School: 3

Exciting.

Everyone has finished typesetting and this afternoon they have been proofing their formes.

I am staying behind a while to set the colophon.

The week has passed the hump, and tomorrow we'll all be frantic as we feel the week press in.

My eye-bags are getting eye-bags and my brain hurts. But I'm still having fun. We're all learning from each other.

Today we were videoed and interviews for the State Library of Victoria's YouTube channel. I will send you the link when they edit our all our 'ummms' and make it look/sound slick.

I think that's all I have the energy to write.

Sorry business

You know that you're heading into Senior Moment territory when you realise, in a wave of cold sweat, that you've not only double-booked yourself, in a way that you just can't rectify, but the people you've stood up ARE YOUR PARENTS. Mind you, if it was a true SM, my parents would be dead or horribly old, but it was close enough.

I have been holding two separate events happily in my mental calendar, not bothering to write either in my iPhone calendar because I was so confident that I was not going to forget them... and I didn't. I just hadn't realised that they were happening at the same time.

So. I'd made a date with Lady Duck to go to the Fred Williams exhibition at the NGA today, because it was her birthday just before mine, and she's been in love with FW forever and forever. I'd bought her the catalogue, and Colonel Duck was going to do something else for a while as we immersed ourselves.

I also enrolled in a screenprinting class this weekend at Megalo with Minigraff, partly to encourage my friend Jezza to come along & use his awesome design skills in a more physical way, and partly because screenprinting fell through the cracks of my printmaking education, and I've always wanted to try it.

It wasn't until I turned up this morning, bang on time (because Mini runs a TIGHT SHIP AND WOE BETIDE ANYONE WHO COMES LATE (unless they've made a cake)), when I thought to myself 'I'm so loving this. Just think, next Sunday I'll be looking at art with mum... or was it this Sunday? Which means it would be... oh shit... TODAY!'. I dashed outside and rang them, and sure enough, I was between a rock and a hard place.

Bugger. Buggery bugger.

They were in Canberra for another reason, which is good, and to his credit, CD took mum to see the show anyway, because if she'd missed it, she'd always regret it. But I feel like a heel. When I rang up tonight to apologise AGAIN, Colonel Duck answered the phone and said to my meek 'hi', 'Who's that? Our daughter? We don't have a daughter anymore...' and then thankfully burst out laughing.

Phew. If it's any consolation, the class was really, really good. Here's what I made:



Balloon Day, © Ampersand Duck 2011

I thought I might do a run on tea-towels later in the year, along with a few other cat designs. I like how well black cats work with screenprinting!


When I got home, the house was empty. The boys have gone to Kyogle for a week to visit our new {cough} great-nephew. I'm cat-sitting and catching up on various things, including sleep. Best holiday ever!

I started with some gardening. They (the boys) gave me a magnolia tree for my birthday, something I've always wanted to have in the garden. We went down to the nursery and I found a variety called:



STAHWAZ!! How could I resist? I've planted it where it will eventually cast shade on the studio in summer, allow sun in winter, and will look stunning in spring. *happy*

The garden is delightful.



I did a tour of the garden with the cats and took some photos.



Check out my dogwood tree!

I've got the rest of the photos as a flickr set, but here's a couple more:







Time to make a simple dinner and watch Mme Ramostwe do her thang. So nice not to have to get all fancypants with the food, etc.

Communing with nature

Where does the time go? Out the window, it seems.

When I started my residency at the primary school, I asked all the kids to ask the weather to only rain on Mondays (that's the day I work indoors, at the art skool) but so far it seems to rain every Tuesday. Yesterday was abysmal, cold and wet, and I have to work outside, under a shelter thankfully, because there's just no indoor space for me.

I've updated my work blog, to talk about my pen & ink week with the kids. Unfortunately the latest upgrade of Wordpress has borked a few things, like spaces after punctuation are gone and the titles repeat themselves so that they sound like that goose from Charlotte's Web. I'm trying to fix them, but there's no time! No time! Have to keep moving along, so much to do.

I found a wee crack of time last week to drive across town and meet Elephant's Child. Canberra is an incredible city; in most cities you spend 25 minutes in your car and move about 2 kilometres. In Canberra, if you spend that much time driving, you've gone 40 kilometres. Apparently we drive more kms per capita than Northern Territorians. I find that shocking, but I digress. I drove what seems to be a long way because I rarely venture outside of my suburb cluster, but it's a journey most people take every day to work and back.

Anyhoo, Elephant's Child is, of course, delightful, and we managed to whittle away a hour or so talking about important things like books, cats and community service after we'd done a plant swap (which was the motivation for the visit). I would have liked to have talked more about books, but I came away with a borrowed copy of Tove Jansson's The Summer Book, so that should be a good conversation starter for next time. And there's always on-line.

I have managed to cross a few things from my bloody To Do list... I finished my latest Book Art Object offering (I'm just waiting for the recipients to get them before I show it; the wait and then reveal seems to be the funnest part of the process), I'm on the last stage of the residency process, and now the next big hurdle is getting the Impact conference done and dusted. October, month of rest, is on the horizon!

Oh crap, look at the time. Have to wing pedal* my way to school and set up my printshop again. Yesterday, despite the weather, I had an amazing exploratory day working out a system of printing with the children. I love the way their creativity is boundless. I came home exhausted, of course, but I learned more in a day than I ever did at art school :)




*Did I ever mention that I recently read Claire Corbett's When We Have Wings? OMG, if you've ever dreamed about flying... read the book. Do yourself a favour!

Catch chasies

Honestly, I always think I'm being busy and complaining about it too much, but then it all ramps up and I feel like the last phase was a bit of a holiday, really. I'm sorry about not blogging... I've left you with my press up in the air being held by a nice Samoan man, and then being hoiked into place in my new studio, but that's it.

Well. Since then I had a rollerskate in the old studio, and was joined by Bumblebee who thought it all looked pretty easy and decided, since he could just fit into my skates, to have a go himself.



Sorry about the giggle, I couldn't help myself. He did alright for his first time once he'd warmed up and fallen over a bit. Me? I had fun:



The wobbly bit is B being scared that I'd 'clip his feet' so he got up on the table. As if I would! Complete control. I was looking particularly Snape-like that day; it had been a long week of moving endless typetrays and boxes.

I haven't had time to unbox completely; the studio is now functional, I've done some printing and binding, but every time I need something, I have to remember where it was packed. I'll have to get it all sorted in the next few weeks, because I've promised my residency school that I will have an open studio one weekend!

Padge, of the two cats, is enjoying the studio. He's an excellent studio cat, but with a bad habit of flopping right in the path of my press walking as I print things. Will have to break that habit! Here's a few studio cat shots:







The 'ramping up' bit is that I've started my stint as an artist in residence at a local early learning primary school. I've written about it at the Ampersand Duck website, but I'll give you all the really fun bits here...

Like meeting Constable Kenny!



I thought CK was Australia-wide, but it turns out that he's a peculiarly Canberran institution, and has been operated by the one man for over 20 years! CK is great fun, a growly koala who dishes out the knowledge about policing in the ACT, complete with his personal cop-car:



Best Beloved is miffed because I didn't know about the CK visit beforehand; he has a copy of 'Constable Kenny and the Drugrats' that he wanted to get signed...

I did get a Constable Kenny stamp on my hand and a pen.



It says
WHAT DO WE WANT?
NO TROUBLE

I think we should send Constable Kenny over to London, he'd sort those boys out.

Having that stamp made up for the fact that earlier that day, while setting up my printshop, I'd sliced off the tip of my nose-picking finger with a stanley knife.



Just the tip and a bit of fingernail, luckily no kids were around because it bled like nothing on earth, and when I came back from getting first aid, there was my little fingertip, waiting for me. I thought about giving it a decent funeral, or maybe flinging it to the chooks, but chucked it in the bin instead. At least it's the left hand, and it will grow back. The bandage was very good for warning the children about using the press without my supervision; I didn't tell them how I hurt my finger, but I didn't dissuade them from the notion that the press had done it :)

In any case, the project is going nicely, and I'm loving the fun and energy of the children and their young teachers. I come home without any energy at all, but I'm usually recharged by the next day. I haven't worked full-time for years... bring on the weekend!

woody goodness

I'm spending the weekend learning how to make and print wood engravings at marvellous Megalo, the local printmaking access studio. It's something I've wanted to do for a while now, ever since I fell in love with the work of Rosalind Atkins and Barbara Hanrahan.

For a really good explanation of how to do wood engraving, go here. I'm being taught by master printmaker Patsy Payne, who hasn't made a wood engraving for ten years, but made lots of gorgeous ones in the 1990s (she works with large scale woodcut and lino images these days).


She laid lots of her blocks and their corresponding prints out on the table for us to study (and drool).

We learned how about the tools:





They have wonderful names like 'spitsticker', 'bullsticker', 'scorper'. We also learned how to hold them properly:


I'm gripping a bit tightly with my thumb here, because I'm nervous :)

And how to engrave:


(Patsy's hands, giving a demo.)

And we learned how to put an image on the block if you don't just want to draw or carve directly without planning. We are using pieces of maple, small cubes joined together to make larger pieces. We had to sand them gently to give them a surface polish like glass, to allow us to print a very rich, silky black. Once polished, we gave the printing surface a thin and quick coating of white gouache, rubbing it off so as not to dampen the wood, but allowing it to stain white, to allow us to draw easily on the blocks.


This is my block, whitened. It's about 7 x 5cm.

I'll walk you through what I got up to today.


I'd found an old drawing in a sketchbook from when I was learning to make prints; I was doing a lot of 'body' drawings (I was a life model at the time). This is a sketch of the original sketch, pared down and made the same size as the block.


This is the block after I'd transferred the drawing to tissue paper, redrawn it onto the block (reversed) using carbon paper, and then drawn up again in Indian ink.


Now we're dabbing printing ink on the surface, and then rubbing it off vigorously to remove as much as possible; the aim is to darken the surface yet still be able to see the ink drawing. Then when I carve, I'll see the light wood through the dark and will get an idea of the print's progress.


It's a hard photo to take! But you can see the drawing if you look carefully.


And then you carve, and Patsy let us play with marks on a test piece first to get a feel for the tools. Once you sit in front of your own block, things get scary. But I steeled myself (heh, with a tool), and got stuck in, so to speak. This is as far as I've got, and I'll finish the rest tomorrow. I may have to go back into that top leg again once I've proofed it, but I'm fairly happy so far. I love the sound the tools make as they cut through the wood.

More tomorrow!