A Book of Numbers

Last week, Fiona and I attended a Glen Skein workshop at the Cooroy Butter Factory Arts precinct. We had a great day and played with collage and printing onto book pages. Glen is very non precious about his printmaking, so we used rollers, heavy plastic plates, textures and fabrics - both positive and negative images. Check out his website - his work is amazing - so beautiful and full of mysterious text and imagery.

Glen showed us a quick and easy binding technique creating crosses on the spine,

I haven't glued down the end papers yet - not sure whether I should do this or leave the book 'undoable'. What do the book binders say about this?? 

I wasn't greatly happy with my printmaking results [a hot day and water based inks didn't help], but I played with text for the first time, and stuck with circles and stumpy straight lines. Loved the text - snippets of words and the numbers appeared serendipidously [is this a word?].

Once home I did my usual thing - doubled the number of pages, made the book into a 1 to 10 text [8 pages for each number], and made a cover.

It is 13cm x 9.5cm x 2.5 cm

I have been playing with rusting, dying and staining sheets of paper [tea, inks, 'bruised' textured paper] and have ended up with some fascinating and beautiful results - many have been used in this book.

Here is a selection of pages....

Great fun - thanks Glen.

Collage Exhibition and Exchange

Through my new blogging network, I have found a 'Collage Exhibition and Exchange' run by Dale Copeland in NZ. This is the 12th year for the exchange!! The idea is to produce 13 X A4 sized collages, send them to Dale where she will exhibit one and swap the others around between all participants. I love the idea... a way to own other artists' work [from all over the world] by swapping.
Once again, I have used my life drawings. I love having a way to 'exhibit' and share the best of my life drawings.
Here are a few of the collages I sent to NZ.