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.
While I was in Japan last year I took to collage as a fast way to get new ideas out and into the world.
Image from ‘The Beauty Series’
I’d dabbled a bit with this approach, earlier in 2016, combining simple collages and watercolours in a concertina book.
World Watercolor Month, watercolour and collage
The latest manifestation, an ‘altered’ book, has come into existence during the masterclass I participated in last week. I think it was apt when someone commented that my book was not so much ‘altered’ as ‘interfered with’.
An early entry in my ‘Travel Diary’
Like many others I have signed up for World Watercolor Month in July, where contributors are asked to complete one watercolour a day. Of course I had to make things more challenging only because I saw someone else’s concertina book at about the same time as I decided to participate. Excellent!
I retrieved some very ‘mature’ paper, that I had in my back room purchased in Tokyo 10 years ago. Definitely time to get it into use. A quick trot through our local recycling centre on the first of the month brought it all together. There I found a hard-cover book of photographs of the Etosha Pan by Alice Mertens (1915-2001). I loved the way the herd of zebras crossed the back and front covers of the book, so I decided to use them for my book’s covers. The predominantly black and white photos inside were so compelling that I will include them in my book as well.
Two sketches and the back cover of my new book.
So be warned, zebras crossing.
I made this book back in June and forgot to post the pictures. This concertina book is 8cm high and about 5 cm wide. As it is made from some left-over bits of pages from my drawing book its shape is a bit ‘random’.
My plan for this little book was to do a series of sketches of objects that caught my eye in one of those beautifully set out interior design books.
The book I was looking at was Hand Made Home by Mark & Sally Bailey, (published by Ryland, Peters & Small 2011). There were lots of interesting pots, stools and chairs, fabrics and other paraphenalia. My goal was to only spend a few minutes on painting each item.
The book is painted on both sides and is 42 cm in length.
This took just over 1 hour to finish, which went a long way to ensuring that I didn’t overwork each piece.
leonieandrews 