a tangent

This post isn't particularly to do with illustration but since I made the beard book, I've acquired a bit of a reputation as a pogonologist (hmmm..maybe I could that on my CV?) And thus friends, acquaintances and sometimes random strangers have taken to arbitrarily emailing me beard related trivia (which is happily of interest to me :). Here is something that was recently featured in the Guardian that my friend Maria kindly sent to me which I thought I'd share. 

Pogonology in progress

I've come to the conclusion that things take approximately four times longer to do than I think they will! Producing this book has been a very labour intensive process and involved a lot of planning. It was a step by step process - Screen printing the illustrations, aligning and overprinting the letterpress, trimming down to size, folding the sheets, embroidering each page, binding the sheets and attaching the cover. Each stage posed different challenges to be overcome and I've learned a lot about hand-made processes.

Lock and Load

I've been working over the past couple of months on a limited edition hand-made alphabet book about different types of beards. I've developed a real appreciation for hand-made things over the years and I've been striving to strengthen the craft element in my illustration and design work.

I think I underestimated the work and precision involved when I started this project. As I designer I'm very used to using InDesign. This makes it easy to make changes and edits to the layout and typography right up until the job is printed. Creating something that is entirely hand-made is a very different process. It's definitely more restrictive but it forces you to really think and plan and make definite decisions before you start. It's a lot more labour intensive but that's what inevitably makes it more satisfying.

The job is well on it's way now. I've screen printed all of the illustrations and have almost finished printing all of the letterpress. Setting the press to align the letterpress with the screen prints was quite an exacting process (I'll never take InDesign for granted again!). Once all of the printing is completed I intend to embroider over the prints and then hand bind the pages.

'Cover' exhibition

This exhibition was curated by the illustration students and is the first in a series of MA pathway exhibitions at Wilson Road. The theme of the exhibition was 'cover'. This could be interpreted as literally or as loosely as one wished. I picked beards (covering the face) as a theme for my submission. After some online research  I learned that there are quite a lot of different types of weird and wonderful beards out there! The final pieces are a combination of letterpress, drawing and embroidery.