In Progress: Collaborative Book Project

I had a bit of an "oh shit" moment earlier in the week when I remembered that I had signed up to participate in a collaborative book project for the Bookbinding Etsy Street Team (aka BEST). I hadn't even started yet. Then there was more panic as I searched through my emails only to discover that I had accidentally deleted the instructions, the poem we were meant to be working with, and the post with the due date and the stanza I got in the random draw. I sent off a quick, embarrassed email to my group (there were enough people for several 5-person groups), and very quickly got two responses with the required information from a couple of my (very supportive) team members.

So the project is this: members of BEST were assigned to 5-person groups, and each group got a poem to work with (ours was written by one of our group members). Then each person makes 6 copies of a signature (in this case, one sheet folded into a 2-leaf signature) inspired by the poem. Then we send 5 of the 6 copies of our completed signature to the project organizer, who sends 4 of them to the other group members, and keeps the fifth to bind herself. When we get the other four members' work, we bind them into a book. The 6th copy of the book will be bound by the project organizer and exhibited.

My group's poem is "The Garden of Her Heart" by Eva Buchala, and I got the second stanza, full of weed and flower and tree imagery. I may be working a little more literally than the project requires, but I couldn't resist the plants! The image of a bent and twisted tree especially captured my imagination, so that's where I started, with a centre spread. Here's the sketch:

I had thoughts of doing this as a print, so I wouldn't have to draw the same image over and over again six times. As I sketched, I decided that if my resulting design was simple enough to cut quickly in lino (quickly because I need to finish and mail by Friday), I'd do linoprints. I don't have the facilities at home (yet) to do any other kind of printing, alas. When I had a sketch I liked, I realized that it wouldn't be easy enough to do in lino that I could do it quickly. I briefly entertained the idea of scanning and printing digitally, then hand-colouring, but my laser printer chokes on paper that isn't specifically made for printers, and the ink on my lovely inkjet will run with watercolours on top of it. So hand-drawing it is.

I spent several hours yesterday afternoon/evening inking trees. I had to go to plan B for transferring the image. Plan A was to ink directly on the blank paper by working on my lightbox with the sketch underneath. Sadly, my sketch was not dark enough and the lights in my lightbox not bright enough, to penetrate the heavy printmaking paper I chose. So plan B was to rub graphite on the back of the sketch and trace over the lines as if I had transfer paper under. By the time I did that six times, my hand was already getting tired and I still had the actual ink to do.

So there it is. I basically drew the same tree six times, and finished just in time to catch Treme on HBO. It's drawn with india ink and a crowquill on BFK Rives printmaking paper in grey. I don't know why I picked the grey paper. It just seemed a nice change from my usual brown/cream tones. Though of course when it's done, there will be a lot of brown on the tree . . .

Next I'll transfer and ink the pages on the other side. When that's dry, I'll start the colouring--first one side, then dry, then the other side. Then I'll add the text. If all goes well, I should be done in plenty of time to mail them out on Friday.

And here are all the trees with the sketch after tracing over it six times:

More for Sandra Brownlee: Deluxe Edition

A while back, I bound a big pile of exhibition catalogues for textiles artist Sandra Brownlee. More recently, I worked on the deluxe edition of the catalogue, which featured hand-worked pages, textile additions and a woven paper cover. The inclusion of pages made from textiles and the mounting of various items meant the binding went much slower than that of the paperback edition, even though most of the textblock was the same. It was also more challenging--and thus more interesting--to work on.

To speed up the process of punching sewing holes--a tedious exercise when you're doing a lot of them, I used this jig made of stiff card, needles, and tape. The closest needle in the photo sticks out quite a bit farther than the others, to rest the bottom of the sections against, so all the holes end up punched in the same place on each section. The main problem with this process is that, with so many needles, it's much easier to jab yourself. (My number one bookbinding injury is needle pokes.)


Some of the added pages in the deluxe edition were actual textiles. There was a section of folded polka-dot sheer fabric, a translucent fabric section with a photograph digitally printed on it, and this one, a handwoven hemp page.



Other deluxe pages feature hand-drawing, embroidery, hand-poked holes, texture, and this fold-out section showing the whole length of one of Sandra's weavings.


There's some possibility that the non-deluxe, paperback edition of the catalogue may be reprinted, and if that's the case, I'll probably work on the binding again. Sandra is a wonderful person to work for. She's so enthusiastic about craft and appreciative of even the most basic handbinding, that I always go away from our meetings feeling fantastic about what I do.

50 Books and 2010 Goals

Some of you may remember a few years back when I picked up a challenge (I no longer recall who the originator of the challenge was, or where online I found it) to read 50 books in the year and blog about it. That first year, I was single and working entirely from home, and I ended up expanding the challenge to 50 fiction, 50 non-fiction, and 50 graphic novels, and still beating it easily.

So this year I've decided to change things (though I'm not single anymore, and often drive for more than an hour to get to the printshop, which will cut down on my free time). I'll still aim for reading 50 books (and maybe, if it goes well, for 50 fiction, non-fiction and comics). But this year, I'm going to try to bind 50 books.


While I don't count books I've already started in my reading 50 books challenge, I think I will include books started in my binding 50 books challenge, as incentive for me to finish the projects I've started and not finished over the past couple of years. So yeah, this year I aim to bind (at least) 50 books, and I'll blog them here.

And as for 2010 goals, I don't usually make actual New Year's Resolutions, but I do like to start the year with some general goals. This year, besides the 50 books thing, my goals are:

• take White Raven Ink seriously as a business, including registering the name, working on marketing, developing product, getting the website finsihed, etc
  
• finish, or at least get a bunch more done, Fey: Drawing Borders
  
• seriously get back into writing fiction (and maybe even finish White Foxes, Full Moon), including submitting stories and further exploring the possibilities of POD, and writing The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring as an illustrated serial novel
  
• work on illustration, including furthering my skills in Photoshop and Illustrator--one of the projects I'll be doing is full-colour Photoshop illos for Aeryn
  
• work on organizing and cataloging my backlog of photographs
  
• get a portfolio together for Viewpoint Gallery and apply for membership
  
• apply for at least one show
  
• become more active online (one selected sites) in order to network and market my work
  
• make some time to play video games for fun (and not just for work)

Well, I think that's enough for now. Like I said, they're fairly general goals, but that makes them more feasible. 2009 was a pretty good year for me professionally (plus I bought a house!); I'd like 2010 to be even better.


Photos: Top - Copper Manuscript of the Hill People of Frisland. Copper-covered coptic stitch book with Japanese paper pages, hand-done calligraphy and illustrations. Photo and art by Niko.

Bottom - Sneak-preview back cover of an in-progress POD book project (and possible gallery show) called Taxonomy gastronomica (Silvester). Photos and design by Niko.

Comic Book Madness

Well, so far I've managed to spend most of the weekend fiddling around with comics, doing a bit of scanning, some organizing of my Webcomics Nation site, and lots of button, banner and logo making.


Also, as you may have guessed from the "a bit of scanning" comment above, I now have a working scanner. Futureshop had that scanner I've been wanting marked down--about $100 less than the original price, which makes it almost $200 less than the new price. And I had a FS gift card (thanks, Dad!). So I splurged. And now I can get to work on some photo projects as well as comics (and explain that weird grocery list I posted way back when). It's very exciting. I haven't actually scanned any photos yet, but I'll start soon. I need to have an application for the grad show in by mid-February, so I need to get at least that one image finished by then (that is to say, scanned and cleaned up and looking fabulous).

What I have been doing with the scanner is making some images for my new comic series, which will debut on Webcomics Nation tomorrow!! My aim is to do weekly updates, but I don't have a big store of completed pages like I do for Fey, so I don't know how long I can keep that up. The drawings are smaller than Fey drawings, though, and I seem to be able to do a two-page spread in about the same time as it would take me to do a single page of Fey, so there may be hope for the weekly schedule.

So yeah, look for it tomorrow.



(Typefaces in both logos are from the fabulous Scriptorium. (Except the text that says "Fey"--that's all me.) Yes, I even paid for them.)

Type Specimens

Yesterday my wood type class installed our group projects in various places around NSCAD. Two of the groups (including mine) installed in windows off the Granville Mall/courtyard--one in the Seeds building and one in the building right next door if you're looking for it. The third group put theirs in the display case in the Duke building elevator.

I'm not normally enthusiastic about group projects, but this one was fun. The main idea for the project was mine, and I kind of felt like maybe I was too much of a control freak, but everyone kept agreeing with me . . .


(Apologies for the shadows; click photos to embiggen.) It didn't turn out quite as fabulous as I'd imagined--we had problems getting the letters to hang right, and I would have liked the book to be propped up a bit, and the backdrop is obviously a white bedsheet--but considering the time constraints and the somewhat ambitious nature of the project, I think it came out pretty well.

Here's the project from the adjacent window:


And one of the elevator:


After the installation, we walked around and did a critique, then went back to the classroom and had food. We were sort of calling it our "opening," even though our class were the only people there, so I wore my tailcoat and pinned a leftover blue N to my lapel. It was fun.

Here are a couple of closeups of my group's project.


It's hard to see, but the letters in the books are loose, and pinned in like butterfly specimens. When I made the book, I had intended to do a quick case binding that wouldn't do much other than look good in the window, but I ended up staying up late one night making a nice solid proper binding with the tapes laced into the boards, and a hollow back, and everything. It's the biggest book I've ever made, and even though the pages are only cartridge paper, it'll make a fine sketchbook (or, I'm thinking, a book for practicing calligraphy in). Assuming the rest of my group lets me keep it.


All of the letters we used were printed on a Vandercook proofing press from old wood type, then carefully cut out. (If anyone ever has a surplus of money they don't know what to do with, I'd like a Vandercook, please.)


I think ours was the only piece of the three with a title. Oh, and I didn't put my name first because I'm an egotist; my group members insisted.