Jig Videos

I like this guy's bookmaking videos. Here he makes a jig for an embossed inset.



It was third in a series on making jigs for an accordion. Parts one and two are here. It's interesting to see how people approach such things.

E-motives Laptop Project

The miniature laptop, my recreational amusement of the moment, is coming along. The basic form is assembled. The keyboard will be resized and added soon. For a while it wouldn't close properly, but that problem was solved with the use of a smaller diameter hinging wire. And the pages for the book, which will be housed in the "screen" and are meant to look like parody web pages, are just waiting to be put together (the mock ups are shown here). 

"How to stalk someone" turns out to actually be a popular search item on Google. I was thinking in terms of parody, outrageousness (although you'd think I'd know better, seeing as I've been harassed myself). After typing only a little bit of it, the rest of the phrase quickly pops up, suggested by the search engine itself. This is presumably based upon this term's 5,190,000 hits. Um.....interesting. I think.

Etc...

(Ok--perhaps it'll make more sense once it's finished...?)

Tyvek For a Miniature Laptop

I've had an idea that I've been hoping to turn into into a book before the We Love Your Books submission deadline in less than a month. The theme for their next show is "e-motive," to be interpreted widely. The book will be about unsavory things people do online--"not everybody's e-motives are as nice as yours and mine" will be part of the text.

I decided on a sculptural cover designed to look like a laptop. It's made of bookboard and a little bit of basswood. For the keyboard and overall look of it, I scanned all the various sides of an actual old grey laptop and manipulated them in Photoshop. Even so, what could I use for a covering material that would suggest a laptop in looks and texture?

I had a hunch that Tyvek might just work. In Photoshop, I made a sheet-sized area to print from the scan of the laptop's outer top cover. It's a slightly textured-looking grey. I printed this onto the Tyvek with my pigment inkjet. Only it came out green, not grey. So I tried it again only using black ink. Not bad.

To hinge it together, I cut a plastic cotton swab handle into sections and fashioned them into a hinge attached to alternating parts of the cover's inner edges. Through this I will thread a wire to hold it together. It's still not assembled, but it looks as though it's going to work. The reason the bottom half looks blue and streaky in the photo is that I had to rip the Tyvek off. It's waiting to be re-covered. The keyboard will be added on top of that.

It doesn't exactly feel like a plastic laptop cover, but it suggests a plastic-like texture, and is definitely not like paper. And the variations in the Tyvek add to a look of beat-up old laptop. We'll see...

The book's pages are going to fit into the screen area on top. Along with all the rest of it, I'm still working on those.

Background on Tyvek

Jumping to Conclusions

As some of you who get a feed of this blog know, I recently put up a post about stumbling upon someone selling cards of my artwork online, unbeknownst to me.

The cards were originally from a company I'd licensed some collage work to several years ago. That relationship didn't end well. The company went out of business without telling me. To this day, I have no idea if I was paid everything I was owed. I was left with a bad feeling about the whole enterprise. My first reaction when I found this new, unknown (to me) distributor was a suspicion that these were cards that I'd never been paid for. My license with the original company ended almost a decade ago.

But it turns out the people selling the cards are legit. They bought them years ago when the other company was still around and, theoretically, I should've been paid for them at the time by the original company. They found this old box in inventory and decided to sell them. I believe the current distributor. In my sheepish haste, I deleted the original post.

I guess the saddest thing to me is how easy it is, as an artist, to jump to conclusions to assume that something unsavory is going on.

Above, one of the images in question: Path of No Knowing (c) 1996.

Maps as Art

The world's smallest atlas, made for Queen Mary's doll house.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

I've been pondering a potential project--a metaphorical atlas (for lack of a better description). I've long loved maps and map-like visuals, and have been wanting to use that kind of imagery in my artwork for as long as I can remember. I think the time is coming to do it as a book. We'll see if anything materializes. For now, it's mostly in the sketching and pondering phase. 

What made me want to mention this was stumbling upon this exhibition review on the BBC news site. The British Library and the Royal Geographical Society are both currently putting on shows that focus on the artistic aspect of maps. One of the items they show is the miniature atlas above. 

Back from Beyond

I trekked to the Bay Area last week. I'm still getting settled back in. I went to an evening workshop with Sara Burgess at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Her papercuttings are divine, and I figured mingling with some knife-happy, paper-crazy folks outside of my isolated corner in the Redwoods might be just the thing.

I also reconnected with a few old friends along the way that I don't get to see nearly enough. This was good, but also sad. So many people I care about are going through such hard times--major economic insecurity, unemployment, frightening health stuff...

As for the workshop, my hands did not want to cooperate. Not to boast, but I used to be able to wield a scalpel or X-Acto with a fair amount of skill. Not so much anymore, alas. But the show-and-tell of Sara's work alone made the night worth it. The books she makes from her all-white scherenschnitte-style papercuttings are exquisitely intricate. She fashions some of the cut pages into map folds that pop out when opened. She showed us one multi-layered carousel book that looked like delicate layers of lace. Unfortunately, there isn't much of her cut paper work online, but she says that she plans to put more up on a site she has just started, White Papers Press. You can already see a few examples of her work's complexity there.

These snaps are from my drive home. I went slowly and stopped a lot on the way. The rain made it particularly scenic.