Done?

...maybe.  I speak of the book I started as a trial run, here.  I found enough energy to finish the reverse, so here it is in it's penultimate incarnation.

Despite what you're seeing in the images, the colour on the reverse runs the other way from the front...you can just see that the pink on the 'back' has green on the 'front' (it's peeping through on one of the folds). I thought about adding more curved lines to the 'back', but instead, I think I'll add individual words, to make up a poem.  I may collage them on, rather than writing them...but first, I have to work out what they are... always a good thing...

You can just see the large box of pastels I was using, along with a smaller box.  I do have a lot of pastels (there are a couple more boxes in the studio); fortunately, they don't take up as much room as, say, paint.  I used several, blended together, to get the colours you see here...that's my excuse for having such a large selection.  I may not have a fabric stash any more, but I do have a lot of pastels...

If The Answer Is Fifteen Minutes...

...what was the question?  Well, quite simply, that's the amount of time I can work before I'm too tired to continue.  Given that this is the first day I've felt like doing anything other than something very basic, like folding the book from yesterday, that's reasonable...after all, I've only been out of bed for a few days.  The real question, of course, is how long I'm going to be stuck at that...and the simple answer is, I have no idea.  Anyway...

I wanted to get on with the book I showed you yesterday, and decided to stick with pastels, and use the same basic colours in each section of the book, but in reverse order, so, green in one section at one side, means green on the same section but at the other end of the book on the other side.  Sorry, no photo to prove that lol.  This is as far as I have got so far.

I had forgotten how much I enjoy working with pastels.  It's a very direct way of applying colour, no intervening brush, no water, unless you want to use it. Just me, my fingers, the paper and the pigment.  The colour here is built up using roughly five or six different shades of the same colour, with a little bit of white here and there.  That's fun to do.  Here is a couple of the pages in close up, so you can see what I mean.

I've run out of steam, now, so it'll have to wait.  Fortunately I can leave the work set up in the studio without inconveniencing anyone, so it can wait as long as it has to.  I can't do this work on the sofa; too much dust, that would be impossible to remove from either upholstery or carpet (yes, that is the voice of experience).  I'm working onto a sheet of clear plastic, so that if there is too much dust to pick up, I can simply fold up the plastic and bin it.  I also have a hand held vacuum cleaner, and the floor in there is tile-effect vinyl, so easy to clean up.  In Norfolk, this kind of work would have been done in the shed, but I don't have that luxury any more. 

More when I'm able to do it.

Dry Run

I said in my last post that I needed to try out the ideas I had for the book I'm currently working on.  Yesterday I went on the hunt for a bit of paper, not a difficult task in my workroom, where a whole long shelf is devoted to different types.   And I got sidetracked by this piece, torn from a sketchbook.  The image is a variation of the kind of thing I want to try out on yesterday's book, based on semi abstract landscape.  It depicts stratum on stratum of different colours, with drawings on top reminiscent of the kind of thing you see on weather maps, denoting the movement of air, or indeed on OS maps, denoting the topography of an area.  The strata are in chalk pastel, the lines in marker pen.  Sadly, as I found when I started folding, I didn't fix the pastels, so ended up with somewhat chalky hands...but I managed, nonetheless.  Must buy some fixative (probably hairspray, easier to source than formal fixative, and works well).

This is how it looks folded

I think it's quite interesting.  The reverse is, of course, blank, and I'll have some fun deciding what to do with it, again, probably a variation on the patterning that's going on on this side.  I like the way an already random(ish) pattern has become even more so here.  Food for thought, anyway.  Really must get that hairspray...

An Unexpected Find.

While unpacking boxes in late January or early February, I found a roll of hand made paper, which I put aside to bring downstairs to my workroom, with some other art stuff, but somehow never got round to it.  Yesterday, before returning to bed, I went to get the paper to have a look...and found that two of the three pages already had sketches on them.

These are pastel drawings, made around 2007, I think, when the ME wasn't quite so acute.  Doesn't time fly, etc...  I got interested in semi-abstract landscapes, and these are examples.  I was using a lot of pastels at the time, and going to a drawing class, mainly drawing faces, but playing around with the pastels in general, seeing what might be done with them.  I really enjoy working with pastels; there's something very direct about them, applying pigment directly onto paper, using fingers when necessary to blend them.  They're a bit messy, as they generate a lot of dust, but the mess is worthwhile (well, ok, I would say that, being the queen of mess). 

And as soon as I looked at them, I thought...book... a different version of a folded book.  First, though, I'll need to make drawings on the reverse of the paper.  I did, though, make a mock up of the folds required for the book, using the third piece of paper, which doesn't have drawings on it.  This, too, will be drawn on eventually, a different approach to the same thing (see below).

The folds indicate the size of the pages...I won't try to explain further for now.   I do think that it'll be interesting to take a pair of large scale drawings, like the ones I've just found, and divide them up, through folding and cutting, so that they present in a different way, each page standalone, the two drawings interrelated...and yet be able to unfold the book to see the whole thing united again in the original way.  The third book, though, will, I think, have individual drawings like these large scale sketches, option upon option, sixteen in all, relating back to the original drawings, but quite different in approach.

And that's it for today: energy finished.  It really doesn't take much...sigh.