All ready to go

Took down the show at Hillsboro this morning, and I forgot to take a picture again! So now it's too late. Finished framing the pieces I have to deliver tomorrow for Rake's June show. Here are 4 of them framed up, with the kitty's help, obviously.




Got a call from Laura asking for permission to use an image of Calypso for the announcement postcard. Boy, does she ever have my permission! That'd be the first time I've been on a postcard for a group show. How exciting!

All wrapped up, almost

Filled out the forms for a couple of exhibits and packed the books; dropped off 1 set at Laura's gallery for the Sense and Sensuality exhibit and will drop off the other on Tuesday. Visited with Laura, who broke her elbow while renovating the gallery (23 Sandy). Ouch! I originally misunderstood her and thought she broke her elbow OFF! I pictured this loose piece of elbow sliding around on the slippery floor (the reason why she fell) and had to be retrieved and re-attached! Sounds like opening party was great fun (we were at our Friday Night Extreme Taichi class).

Finally, but finally put all copies of Calypso in their containers. I still have to make the 'glamorous evening bags', but at least they're all in their Stonehenge containers at this point. Cleaned up the studio again. It's hard to believe how dusty things get in there, but everything was covered in a layer of grit.

Right, and the strawberry bed got weeded and cleaned up today! A most important chore, if we want a good crop. I still need to fertilize...

Critiques

One of the deals about the exchange is that you have to cough up critiques for the books you do get. And I like critiques to be real critiques, and not just a description of the work at hand, which always makes it a little hard and awkward, especially if you don't know the people and don't know how tender their feelings might be. I myself have pretty thick skin, and I'd just rather people give it to me straight, but I know not everyone's like that.

So the upshot is that these critiques take a while. Took me about 3 hours to do 2 this afternoon and evening. I have a 3rd one that I'll need to do, once the book arrives.

I finally finished making the 2nd set of boxes for Calypso, hopefully these won't fade! I'll be glad to get them all wrapped up, I'm starting to get confused on which ones were the 'good ones' to go into each of the 2 editions.

New box for Calypso

After playing with the Stonehenge boxes, I decided I liked the deckled edge on the front flap, so decided to do a slightly different box design than I originally intended. Printed the title on the side, and added the paint smudges on the cover, to echo the smudges in the book. Finished 10 boxes, then ran out of the gray ribbons. I had hoped to finish all the boxes this weekend, but looks like it won't happen, as I'm helping taking down the PAN show tomorrow (how time flies, a month has gone by).

Boxes & crepes

Gretchin sent along a pointer to her blog of her gocco chocolate sauce experiment, and I'm very envious -- it's a huge success. My experiment with the chocolate sauce on the wonton skin flopped. Read her success story here, and about my flop here and here (so you know what not to do).

Picked up enough Stonehenge Gray to make 21 boxes for Calypso, and was able to make 13, 14 boxes this afternoon. Hope to finish them tomorrow, gocco the title on the spines, and glue everything down. Then I'd be ready to ship off 1 book to the Focus on Books exhibit, one for the Sense and Sensuality show, and the boxes to the exchange recipients who had already gotten the bum boxes.

Wrapping up loose ends

Put issue #21 of Pudding in the mail today, then came home to finish Calypso -- finished sanding all the back plexi covers and roughened the last pages. Discovered that the boxes I had already made have already faded, having sat by the window for the last week or so, and we've been getting a bit of sunshine. I wondered about using poster board for the boxes, and so now I know. I'll need to remake all the boxes, including those that I've already sent off on the exchanges. I made one this afternoon with the Stonehenge Gray, and that seems to be a good weight, so I'll stick with that. I guess that's my weekend project, along with updating the web site, and de-installing the book show at PAN.

Put together a CD with a few images that Lee asked for, for the Maryhill museum exhibit. Went to the USPS web site to figure my postage for the CD, and discovered that they're having a 'vote for your favorite star wars stamp' thing going on. Naturally, I voted for Han Solo. Hey, you can even vote once a day, if you so desire. Click www.usps.com to cast your vote.

I noticed today that I missed a few dandelions, so I'll take care of those tomorrow. I'll need to save a few of the leaves, for my next painting project.

Taxes, day II

...and a couple of pictures. I decided to have Calypso professionally photographed because of the reflective surface, and also how long the book is. I met with the photographer, Aaron Johanson, last Monday and got the CD's back last Wed, but only got around to looking at them today. Here are a couple of the pictures.

The cover is white ink printed over clear plexi. What you can read of the title is the shadow cast by the title printed in white. The plexi is attached to the textblock, which is BFK white, with gel medium.



The middle few pages of the accordion front. The large texts read Acquire/Acquiesce and Time/Tarnish.



Met with Andrew for coffee and catching up today, and got some really good feed back on both the apron project and the vanity project.

Wrapped up my part of the 2006 taxes...amazing, it's not even April yet.

Back in the studio

Finished painting the last spread on the entire edition of Calypso, but haven't sanded all the back cover plexi yet. Spent the afternoon at Aaron's, photographing the book. Took about an hour and 45 minutes, probably because I was there asking for this and that! Should get the CD on Wed. It just absolutely poured as I arrived at his place, so the yard will be soaked for another few days.

Got my first drawing assignment from Suzy. One of the books she recommended arrived yesterday and I'm anxious to give it a try and see how it goes!

The first 5 boxed up and ready to go

Another day with lots of pictures. This was really from last Thursday, when the critique group met. I picked up the paper 'nest/skull' from our previous meeting. My intention was to make an origami ball and inflate it after I insert it though one of the openings. I wanted the ball to be big enough so that it can freely rattle around in the nest but not fall out. Well, after many attempts, I couldn't remember how to make a ball, so there's a cube in there instead. And the openings were really larger than I figured (partly because the paper nest/skull is pretty flexible), so I had to secure the cube. I also stitched up the largest opening. The cube is made from dyed tyvek; the 'threads' I used to sew up the opening were just thin strips of tyvek as well.



Okay! The first 5 signed and numbered copies of Calypso, in their little containers. Two of these are copies for myself and three are going to the exchange. I not going to worry about printing the titles on the spine for these; they're going out as they are.



The front cover. You can sort of make out that the title is casting a shadow.



The book opened up, the front view. The back cover is deliberately marked up, scuffed up, and the paper worn on the edges; you can't really tell from the photo though.



The back of the book.



I hope to take real pictures of the book later this week.

Customer service

Called the Beaverton Art Media today and asked if they carried Arches Cover Gray. And indeed, they didn't. However, he followed up with "but we have Stonehenge Gray." Now that's much better customer service. Went in to pick some up, but the gray turned out to be more like taupe, but I bought a sheet to try anyhow. Also picked up a couple of sheets of gray poster board at Paper Zone, to see how that would work.

At the critique tonight, the feed back I got was that a nicer package would be better. So we talked about my earlier idea, which I had abandoned, of making some kind of an evening bag as a container, and people liked that much better. So I'll have to revisit that. In general though, everyone seemed to like the book; they also thought my $200 price was too low. So I'll have to rethink that again. For sure it's too low if it comes with the evening bag, but maybe it's too low even if I only had a simple box.

Although now that I'm thinking about it again, I'm remember why I abandoned the evening bag idea -- I was afraid that in the act of shelving or removing the book, the fabric would rub against the plexi and the gocco printed title, and that would eventually scratch off the lettering.

Alex had the idea of having a plexi box made. And maybe that's an option, if I go with a colored plexi rather than the clear plexi. Not sure how much that would cost.

Yesterday's bright idea

Lots of pictures today.

This was from a couple of days ago when I was painting the back with the eye shadow. I mixed a few different shades of shadows together to create this purply brown, which I pulverized. I mixed it with some egg medium, and decided that it was still too dense, so I've just added more medium to thin it a bit. You can see the eggy mix in the middle there.



I had known all along what I wanted the text on the back side to say, but I had figured that I'd write it in graphite and then smudge it. The 'bright' idea yesterday was that I should really gocco print the last word, 'beautiful'. It is also the first word in the book, and I like the symmetry. I used the same screen that was used to print the first page, which I had not really cleaned very well, but that was ok, because I wanted a splotchy kind of a look. Well, it actually printed better/cleaner than I was anticipating, but I did get some of the splotchy effect I was after. After I printed the word 'beautiful,' handwriting the rest of the words in graphite just didn't work (I tried). So I ended up using the gocco ink and a brush, and smudging those. Here they are, on the drying rack.



And on the bed.



So here are the first and last pages:





A couple of potted plants in my studio. The Cylamen has been blooming beautifully for over a week now.

Plexi to paper

I am almost done. I didn't think this day would ever come! The first 10 books are finished (although I still need to build containers for them). Maybe I've just been staring at them for too long, I'm not really all that happy with them any more, I just want to be finished. The all transparent and pristine white front cover is a real pain too, any little piece of fuzz, cat hair, dust bits, loose bristles that come off the brush -- there they are! The plexis aren't all square either, phooey.

Off to get some paper suitable for making containers tomorrow. Pictures tomorrow too.

Saw the Borodin Quartet tonight at the Chamber series. Wonderful players, and I always love the Tchaikovsky quartets anyhow.

Panic attack

As I was getting into bed last night, I suddenly had a panic attack -- I had taken my pristine, beautifully printed books and marked them all up! I didn't even remember to keep one unpainted, so I have it to remember how clean and well printed it was (!). I still think it's the right thing to do -- that it should be marked up, scratched up, smeared and smudged -- but it's hard to not have the clean/beautiful thing any more. At least I think it was the right thing to do...in either case, it's a done deal now. I'm all finished with the front side, and half way finished with the back side.

Tomorrow, we're off to visit Suzy Bennett out in Corbett. She's a painter and a conservator of Tibetan thangka paintings. We'll stop at Multnomah to have a late breakfast before heading out to Corbett.

Coloring with eye shadows

Ok, I've advanced to the last to final stage -- coloring with graphite and eye shadows. Actually, I'm not sure if this particular color was eye shadow or not. It's part of a huge package of all kinds of colors, and the woman who gave it to me said she used it as eye shadows at times. But it's magenta. I mixed an egg medium, and the colors are staying unless you rub it really hard, which is perfect. I do want it to smear and smudge a bit over time. I tried just applying the eye shadow directly, but that was smearing too easily.

This is a mockup of what I'm planning to do, with some modifications and variations:



Here's the lot of them, with this one particular page done and laid out to dry:

First Thursday

There was still a bit of business/email to deal with for the Print Arts show, then I finished the Tupper interview and put it up on the Portland Open Studios blog. Squeezed in about an hour and half working on Calypso before I had to leave for FT. There were a fair number of people there, considering the not-so-good weather. I'm glad it's all more or less finished at this point. Back to my regularly scheduled programming.

[Update at midnight: I just finished folding and gluing the text blocks for Calypso!]

Preview

I forgot my camera again today, but took some pictures with my phone, but I'm too tired to download them now. The gallery did hire a photographer who took a ton of pictures. We got talking, and she knew all about the gocco and Pudding!

Managed to squeeze in about 45 minutes working on Calypso today, which means I got 1 text block done, between setting up and cleaning up. Caught up on some exercise. Picked up Roger Hercules from Beppu-Wiarda. I hope to frame & hang it pretty quickly. Worked on Tupper's interview for Open Studios. We just got home from seeing The Lives of Others, excellent.

Three stacks

Well, I'm not all finished with folding and gluing yet, as is obvious. 3 stacks of text blocks, plus 9 sets of printed sheets. I could've finished tonight except that I got involved in an email conversation about the exchange. That took a couple of hours, didn't even walk tonight. And didn't get around to mapping out how I want to install Diane's tablets. Hopefully, that won't be too difficult! I have to be at the gallery at 9:30am tomorrow to install. Oy.

There's a lion sleeping in my trunk!

What!? You can't tell that it's a lion?! It's obvious...it's a lion on a pedestal, lying on its side, in my trunk. This is one of those Chinese ceramic garbage cans that are so ubiquitous in mainland China. Obviously designed by artists and not engineers -- although the lion has a big gaping mouth for a receptacle, that little hole on the bottom of the pedestal is how you would have to get the garbage out!

So we were at the China Council's annual Chinese New Year fundraiser auction, and as always I buy something totally inappropriate and useless. Last year, I bought the Peking Opera Monkey King suit, and this year, it's a giant garbage can! Of course I pass up all the gorgeous silk and wool rugs...just another thing to vacuum. I did buy a set of very cool stamps with a design from the Dunhuang caves and a book about China and Iran. And a very cute Chinese ink brush painting by a 9 year old.

I did work on Calypso today. Here are all the sheets laid out in order, waited to be folded and glued into the text block. Hopefully, tomorrow by this time, these stacks will be shorter, or maybe gone, and the stack of text blocks will be a lot bigger.

Starting to come together

Started to put the pages together. Here's one that's glued and trimmed, although I haven't added the hand drawing/painting part. If I were finishing this for real, I'd add the hand drawing/painting before I trim it up, but this one was going to be a reject anyhow due to some bad printing, so I trimmed it to see what it would look like. And to make sure it would fit the plexi covers correctly. And it did.

The 1st half:



And the 2nd half:

Last minute change of plans

Printed the colophon, and finally had the opportunity to try goccoing with the gel medium. I added some retardant to it, slopped it on the screen and printed a few pages. It looked fine printed, but when I pressed paper to plexi (the gel medium is the glue that will hold the 2 together), the words all smeared and became illegible. So onto Plan B.

I ended up printing the text that would've been in the gel medium on the opening page. I have yet to decide what I will print in the gel medium. I think something large and loose will work fine; it was just that the fine text did not work so well.

Btw, even though my little experiment only took about 20 minutes from start to finish (including cleaning up) and I had the window open, I think the retardant really irritated my nose. I'll be sure to put on my chemical mask when I go to print for real.

Spent a little time setting up the blog for Portland Open Studios. There will eventually be information about selected artists, events, and such.