ACEO: Leonardo's Clockwork Scarab

One of my fellow Etsy Steam Team members offered some very cool copper and brass etched ACEOs (Art Cards, Edition and Originals) to trade and I piped up saying I'd make a tiny linocut. Well, turns out 3 1/2 by 2 1/2 inches is really tiny. Not that I can't do a lino that small, it's just that I came up with a design I really liked, but which was way too complex for lino. So instead I did an ink drawing and scanned it, then added some gears in Illustrator (thanks to the "Gears" typeface from Scriptorium which came in a pack of faces I bought a while ago for doing titles for my comics).

Then I wrestled with my laser printer for a while until I determined that it wasn't going to print onto printmaking rag paper no matter how I cajoled or threatened it. So I printed the images onto rag paper with my lovely Canon Pixma Pro9000 photoprinter instead. It may be time for a new laser printer. Here are some of the cards, not yet coloured.


Next I have to see if the photo inks will withstand water. If they do, I'll tea-stain the paper to age it, and then hand-colour with watercolours. If they don't, I'll carefully tea-stain only the very edges, then hand-colour with pencil crayon. I need to get these done, because the one I'm trading for was in today's mail.

So if you want to trade, let me know. I'm doing 15 of these, and one's spoken for, plus I'll keep one or two. Whatever's left I'll put in my Etsy and ArtFire shops.

And, in case it isn't obvious, it's a scarab beetle, with clockwork, and wings inspired by one of Leonardo daVinci's flying machines. I think I'm still going to attempt a tiny ACEO linocut, but not a scarab flying machine. Maybe just a simple beetle.

Wednesday Wishlist: LaMech

Part two of promoting art and craft and getting myself blogging regularly is the Wednesday Wishlist. Basically, this is going to be cool, mostly handmade stuff I find online that I would buy for myself if I had the money. Sometimes I will buy them for myself. But if you're looking for gifts for me (hint, hint) here is a good place to start. Or, you know, cool gifts for anyone. Anyone cool, that is.

My first pick is actually something that was near the top of my to-buy-when-I-have-money list, but has now been removed, on account of I'm trading a Flying Machines calendar for one. So don't buy this for me, but do buy it for the other cool people in your life.


This is the Mechanical Companion (LaMech for ladies and GeMech for gents), made by the tremendously talented Haley Moore (aka toenolla) and available for purchase at High London Mechanical. Or if you prefer Etsy, you can also get it there. See more of Haley's work on her deviantART page.

And The Winner Is . . .

I finally got myself organized and chose the winner of the 2010 "Flying Machines: possible and improbable" calendar.


I determined the winner my counting up how many entries each person had and writing their name on that many slips of paper. Then I shuffled the papers, put them in a box and shook it vigorously, opened the box and shook it a little more, than asked my lovely assistant (the fabulous BillyZ) to draw one of the slips.

So without further ado, the winner is Sunshine Folk! Yaaaaaayyyy! (Imagine Kermit the Frog and his arm-flailing enthusiasm--and if you don't know what I'm talking about, get thee to a video rental place and get some old Muppet Show episodes.)

I didn't get the huge response I was secretly hoping for, but I think the contest was successful in its own modest way, and I'm thinking about having another contest sometime in the not too distant future.

If you didn't win, and you're very sad about it, you can still buy a copy of the calendar on Etsy or ArtFire. And if you read this blog, I'll give you a secret free postage discount. Just post here, and I'll make a special Etsy or ArtFire (your choice) listing just for you. There's no time limit on this offer--as long as I have calendars to sell, you can get free shipping by posting here. (If you want to buy several items, let me know and if the postage isn't too high, I'll give you free shipping on your whole order. If the shipping is a bit steep, I'll knock off the cost of the calendar shipping from the total.)

Anyway, THANK YOU!!! to everyone who entered. You guys are the best.

2010 Flying Machines Calendar!

On Tuesday I finished the last printing I needed to get done before the new year: my 2010 "Flying Machines: possible and improbable" calendar.


On Thursday I trimmed, hole-punched and packaged all 30 of them, and of course signed and numbered them. I had already pre-sold two at the Halifax Crafter's Market, and had two other people interested in buying when they were finished. So I've now sold 5, will keep one for my files, and will probably use 5 or so for gifts. So that leaves 19 for sale in my Etsy shop and my ArtFire shop.

The calendars are printed on one of my favourite (non-handmade) papers for letterpress: Mohawk Via Vellum 80 lb cover. The 100 lb is nice, too, but doesn't fold as well for greeting cards, so I usually buy the 80. The vellum finish gives it a soft texture that doesn't interfere with the printing as heavily textured papers sometimes do. I chose warm white for this, rather than my usual cool white--although cool white tends to have less affect on the ink colour, the warm white seemed better suited to the subject matter, and goes well with the brown ink.

I printed the names of the months first, using a different historic wood type from the Dawson Printshop's collection for each month. I added a lot of transparent base to the ink, and printed relatively lightly in order to get all the texture and imperfections of the old wooden type to show up. For printing the wood type, I used the shop's Vandercook Universal 1 proof press.

Then I printed the numbers and the images at the same time, from polymer plates. I used quite a bit of packing on the cylinder to bring up the pressure and get a nice deep embossment (technically debossment, I suppose). The letters for the days of the week were printed the same way, only with a different colour of ink, of course. The polymer plates were all printed on the shop's Vandercook Universal 2 proof press, a very rare press (apparently only 50 or so were made).

All of the images except two are ones that I found in my various history of flight books (I have a small collections). Many of them are Victorian, and a few of them were in full colour, which meant I had to remove the colour in Photoshop before converting the files to vectors. The two images that weren't ones from my own books came from a file of miscellaneous images on the Printshop computer. Some of the machines pictured actually flew, while others are simply exercises in imaginations.

I'm going to post a contest here soon, where you'll be able to win a copy of the calendar. I think what I'll do is make it a trivia contest, where you'll have to identify some of the machines--maybe which ones actually flew, for example. More on that very soon.

Like Riding a Bicycle

I haven't written much fiction at all in quite a long time, and that's not a good thing. I've sort of been making up for it by reading a lot, but reading fiction is not the same as writing fiction.

So I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year, hoping to kick-start myself into fiction writing again. With so many other things on the go, I'm not sure I'll manage the 50,000 words by the end of the month, but I'm at 1711 so far, which is just a little over the necessary 1667 a day to reach the goal and "win" NaNoWriMo.

It wasn't until I actually sat down to write this evening that I actually decided what to work on. I didn't really want to work on White Foxes, even though I really would like to finally get it done. I wanted something I could start and finish, not something I was halfway through, even though I'm pretty sure there are well over 50,000 words left to go in White Foxes. I considered writing the second book in the Kentaurs series (I wrote the first one last time I did NaNoWriMo), but I don't really know what happens yet--not even how it begins, except that Octavian goes looking for his brother Archer.

But then I remembered that I had been thinking about making The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring into an illustrated serial novel instead of a comic (hypothetically leaving me more time to work on the long-time-in-progress Fey comic). It's something I already had a beginning for (though in a very different form), notes for the near future of, and a general idea of where it was headed. I suspect it may grow into a series of short serial novels, but I won't know until I get there, I guess. So, 1711 words and it's pretty silly, but I'm having fun and it means that anyone who has actually been reading Aeryn on webcomicsnation might actually have something new to read soon. Cool.

I've attempted NaNoWriMo three times before now, in 2003, 2004 and 2005. The first two times I did really well, ending up with The Secret Common-Wealth (a faery story) and The Madness of Kentaurs (an alternate-world fantasy), both YA novels and both well over 50,000 words. The third time was the year I started at NSCAD and I realized almost immediately that it was a really bad idea to try to do end of term projects, and write a novel. The end of term projects alone almost did me in. So, I know I'm capable, at least.

Here's to hastily written novels!

Catalogues for Sandra Brownlee

I'm supposed to be printing cards today. A Halifax stationery store, Duly Noted, is patiently waiting for an order they put in several weeks ago. Alas, today the car decided not to start. In fact, it didn't even seem to try to start. I'm hoping it's something simple that BillyZ will fix in five minutes after he gets home this evening, but in the meantime, I'm not printing.

I'd have had the order finished a couple of weeks ago, if not for a couple of rush jobs that I didn't feel I could turn down (not to mention that the extra income is very welcome since we just bought a house). The first job was the certificates for the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia’s Masterwork Award. (How could I say, "No," to the Lieutenant Governor?) The design had mostly already been completed when the Dawson Printshop printed last year's certificates (I was in Pennsylvania for a few weeks when that happened). Former Dawsonite Carley Colclough did the rest of the design long distance from BC, and then I made the polymer plates and did the printing.

I miscalculated a little when getting the paper together; the paper was from the Colours line by Papeterie St Armand, which is rather smaller than most of the stock we use. And the certificates are quite large. I had thought I would get four certificates from each sheet, but was only able to get two. This meant I didn't have enough paper to make many mistakes. I cut a lot of scrap for testing and re-used some of last year's discards. I managed to print all six certificates (the five finalists and one winner) without a single mishap, which has to be a record, considering it was a four-colour job. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least. I'm very proud to have printed something that will have the Lieutenant Governor's signature on it.

The second rush job was binding the exhibition catalogues for Sandra Brownlee's show at the Mary E. Black Gallery. The show is called Departures and Returns and is on right now, so if you're in Halifax be sure to check it out. It's textiles, but her notebooks are also on display, so there's something there for book people, too.

A few of the 72 softcover catalogues had already been sewn, but I did most of them. Then I had to glue on an inner cover--it's like a wraparound cover you'd see on a paperback, but instead of being the actual cover, it's what the dustjacket wraps around. Then I had to tip in a plate to each copy and fold and install the dustjackets. It took me two full days of work to do all 72--good thing I sew fast. And I was very happy that the books all had their sewing holes punched already, which saved me some time.

On Monday afternoon as I was sewing the catalogues, I got a slightly panicked call from Sandra. She'd decided she was really unhappy with the cover size of the deluxe edition of the catalogue (which I wasn't working on), and wanted to know if I'd be able to help put them together if she changed the size. So Wednesday I drove to Joe's studio where Joe and I and a couple textiles friends of Sandra's worked on covering and attaching the new boards. The originals had been made larger to accommodate some weavings Sandra wanting to include. She decided to re-do the weavings at a smaller size, so the covers could be made to a size that fit the pages of the catalogue. We completed 12 of the 30 in the deluxe edition, which was plenty for the show's opening--Sandra can finish the rest at her leisure now that the show is installed and opened.

So today I was meant to be in the printshop, printing, but am not. Instead, I'll get the files ready to send to film to make the polymer plates for this year's calendar (flying machines! wood type! days of the week!), and I'll start on the next batch of tiny book jewelry (the Japanese-style binding, as I have to get more materials for the European-style ones) for the Halifax Crafters fair in early December. And perhaps I'll make some paste and get to work backing some suede with kozuke for another batch of mini SteamBooks. Maybe I'll even make a couple of larger ones this time.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll get a bit of work done on the website and do some writing. but that is probably wishful thinking. Oh hey, it's almost November. I have to decide if I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo this year. Now that I'm not in school, it might be an achievable goal. And I really need to get writing fiction again.

Some Kind of Milestone

I checked my comics' stats on Webcomics Nation a moment ago, and Fleeing Arcadia (an 8-page Fey short) has hit 500 views. Not only that, but The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring--which only went up on Monday--is at 100 views. Woo hoo!

So yeah, the seven-page Prologue of Aeryn Daring is up now (since Monday). A new page will appear next Monday (which means I had better scan it). Read it! (please . . .)



Also, the main Fey series, which I started posting a few weeks ago, is over 100 views now, while Faerie or Bust, a Fey-related 24-hour comic, hasn't reached 40 yet (but it's only been up a short time).

Oh yeah, and if you want to be notified when any of my comics update, you can sign up for the email notification list.

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.)

Fey!

I'm finally getting around to posting comics online again, but I need a new scanner. My old one works just fine, but in an attempt to get the plug-in working with CS4, I discovered that I'm not sure it was ever working on this machine at all, and the drivers won't install. Not even the newest ones downloaded direct from Canon. Sigh.

So in the meantime, I'm moving Fey over to Webcomicsnation. You'll find all my stuff at http://www.webcomicsnation.com/feynico/ eventually. If you were hoping for new pages, sorry. For now I'm going to be reposting old pages once a week. When I get to the end of them, I'll hopefully have lots of new pages and a new scanner. I will finish this series eventually. I'm also working on a completely new series called The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring. I'm very excited about it. But again, nothing until a new scanner.

The scanner I have my eye on in the Epson Perfection v700 Photo (or the v750-M Pro, except it costs significantly more). Yes, it's very pricey (and I just noticed the price is $100 more than it was when I looked a few weeks ago--I thought the prices on tech were supposed to go down, not up), and it can't even scan anything bigger than 8 1/2 x 11, but it *can* scan negatives all the way up to 8 x 10. I have a crapload of medium format and 4 x 5 negs I want to scan and work with digitally, at least to put them on deviantArt and create a digital portfolio. So. I'll be looking for ways of making a bit of extra cash so I can buy this thing, starting with finally getting some stuff up for sale on Etsy. You'll find me at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6315023, but there's nothing there yet. First, I have to organize and photograph and acquire a postal scale to figure out how much it will cost to mail things.

Anyway, more soon.

What I Did Today (or, Manual Labour)

I actually hauled myself out of bed at 6:15 this morning, a non-school morning, to go print stuff in the lithography studios at school. I had a couple of assignments to work on for tomorrow's class and I wanted to get going before the hordes arrived. It's really nice to work in there first thing in the morning, even though I am not remotely a morning person. Here's one of the presses (not the one I was using today, but pretty much the same except a little smaller):


My first task was to print my aluminum plate, which I've had ready to go for about a week. Because it's just a thin sheet of aluminum, it has to sit on a plate support to go through the press. Here's the plate all inked up and ready to run a proof:


It came out really well, although there was one spelling error and one backwards "s" (it comes from writing backwards, which I'm actually pretty good at, but it's easier to make mistakes). I'll be able to correct the errors later, fortunately.


Once that was done, it was on to working on a colour reductive print, this time on a stone instead of a plate. The idea is to make an image and print it in one colour, then remove parts of the image, print in another colour, and so on. The assignment is to use at least three colours. My idea is to do the three colours, and then use my aluminum plate to print black over top (or maybe a very dark brown). Here's the stone inked up in the first colour, a mustardy yellow (it looks green because it's rather on the transparent side, and there's still black ink in the stone that refused to wash out, even with the stronger solvent):


It started out well, but then . . .

That black ink that was still in there? It stayed put all though the newsprint proofs. Then as soon as I started cover stock proofs, the black started to come out. Not a lot, just enough to make the yellow look a bit dirty, which doesn't really matter with the image in question, so I kept going. Then I noticed some weird embossing on the rag paper prints. I checked the stone. There had started to appear little areas where the surface of the stone seemed to be caving in slightly. Oh, that can't be good.

So I kept going through 5 rag paper copies. Then I was afraid to go any farther in case the stone broke or something. I had intended to do 6 and then if there was time move on to the next colour. Instead I rolled up the stone in black ink and gummed it down to save for later--after I show the weirdness to my teacher and find out if it's still okay to use.