My collection of Loungeroom Residency photos is now flatter and comes with it’s own shadows!
Shadows from shadows, my newly bound photos
My inner ‘neat person’ (who knew I had such a thing) tried to tell me to cut off those wavy edges of paper. I told her to b*gger off.
It has also found a safe home in a box I recently received, which will now be re-purposed into a book case. Peeking through in this photo is a word from my very basic book ends – a recycled postcard glued on either end.
The first outcome of my loungeroom residency is this concertina book. As you can see it’s a work in progress.
A work in progress. All my shadow photos for the past 11 days.
I am assembling all the shadow photos l took over the past 11 days. There are quite a few which didn’t make it to Instagram. I have now wrestled this unwieldy dragon under several dictionaries. I’m not quite sure how long it will take to flatten properly.
Wherever I travel I like to find art materials as momentoes of my trip. As I was going to an Urban Sketchers Symposium I was well aware that an art supply goody bag would be waiting for me there. The market stalls at Symposium are also great places to find well-priced items. None the less I still managed to find some items that I knew wouldn’t be in the bag.
It turned out that I had set myself up to buy, without even really trying. Our hotel in Rotterdam, where we spent the first week of our trip, was directly across the road from two art shops!
To make it easy for myself I have made a visual record of my purchases.
First purchases handmade Khadi paper, a bone folder used in bookbinding, a new fountain pen (of course I need another one!) and some new ink to go with it. And a ring in , my windmill-shaped biscuit cutter.
By way of explanation this fountain pen has one of the biggest reservoirs on the market, which makes it very useful for lots of sketching without having to frequently refill it. This KWZ ink was purchased on the basis that it was waterproof. Unfortunately there was a mis-understanding and it turns out that the green-gold ink is not waterproof. The company makes another green which is water- resistant, but this isn’t it.
My new paints, with the exception of Potters Pink which was only a replacement. A second new ink also with some odd properties.
I seem to be attracted to the blues these days. I was intrigued by the Smalt Blue (AKA Dumont’s Blue). This is a very old form of blue pigment made by grinding glass coloured by smaltite, a cobalt salt, into a fine powder. I assume it was one of the less expensive options than ground lapis lazuli. From some of the reading I have done it has, in oil paint, tended to fade over time, but not all paintings show this fault. It has a purplish tinge which I really like. I expect it will be appearing in my ‘skies’ in the not too distant future.
Much as I am a devotee of Pyrrol Orange (it is one of those irreproducible colours), I do sometimes find it a bit pink. This Transparent Orange, above, is a synthetic pigment with an industrial automotive history, it looks like it fits the bill for a truly orange, orange. I swatched it out, below, with some of my other orange-y paints for a comparison.
As you might decipher in my notes on the page above my Platinum Classic ink (an iron gall ink), is listed as both water soluble and resistent to water. Mmmmm?? A bit of research indicates that while some of the ‘apparent’ colour of the ink may be water soluble, over time the ink gall element should not only resist water, but darken with age. I’m not sure that I will be happy with this latter development, as the solubility of the ink has resulted in some quite pleasing effects. I used it in my workshop with Ròisin Curé, where were were channelling Rembrandt’s use of sepia ink. Here is a sample.
Sepia Black ink, line and diluted ink, part of the sculpture version of the Night Watch on the Rembrantplein in Amsterdam.
Inspiration for this project came my way via a video by Peter Baumgartner on how to make a simple sewn binding book, with a soft cover. I didn’t take step by step photos, as Peter’s is one of the most clearly demonstrated instructional videos I have seen.
I have 10 sheets of coloured watercolour paper (2×5 of each) to play with. For the paper nerds out there this is Bockingford Tinted watercolour paper, 300gsm, cold press, which comes in 5 different colours, oatmeal, cream, grey, eggshell and blue. Being me I’m trying all five colours in the one book.
I have had a bit of an obsession with tinted watercolour paper since I found out that my watercolour hero JMW Turner, regularly painted on blue paper.
It has taken me a while to track some tinted paper down. I tried to get some from Sennelier when I was in Paris last year, but they were out of stock. In the end it turned out that all I needed to do was look online and I found a supplier in Australia! Duh!
As these are soft cover books I have been taking the opportunity to use up all sorts of leftover bits of thinner cardboard and papers to provide inner covers, covers and end papers.
I have included some close-up photos of the spine, as I wasn’t familiar with this stitch. In short you take your thread in and out through the holes in the pages and then back under the stitch below on the outside spine of the book. This results in the ‘cross’ pattern on the book’s spine. I have secured both ends with a coptic binding stitch.
Another critical step is pasting the spine with several layers of acid free PVA to support and consolidate the spine and stitching.
Two more books clamped while the PVA dries on their spines.
Having got to the final stages of adding a cover I raided my stash of Japanese shopping bags (a dark secret from my first trip to Japan over a decade ago), to find something sturdy to use. In this case a paper carrier bag from the Isetan ‘departo’ (department store).
I have now made two further books, extending the paper with the addition of some Arches 300 gsm cold press paper. Even more shopping bags have been used for the latest covers, including one from Jim Thompson and one from Daimaru.
Of course the big test will be how well this construction technique holds up in the field. Fingers crossed.
leonieandrews 