New Sugar

I'm in this issue, click here to have a look.

Bristol Artists' Book Fair

A group of us from the Camberwell Illustration MA had a stall at the Bristol Artists Book fair last weekend. It was a fantastic weekend, lots of great work to see and interesting people to talk to. I also sold some work too which was a bonus including a copy of 'The Book of Pogonology' to The National Irish Visual Arts Library.

Myself and Lizzie certainly didn't come home from the weekend empty handed! We met a very nice man named Bob who virtually sold us his whole stall including an Adana printing press and an entire case of Baskerville 10pt type. It was quite a struggle getting everything back to London on the train but we just about managed. I'm really excited to test it all out.

A - Z of Beards and Moustaches

And here is the final book! 'The book of Pogonology (A - Z of Beards and Moustaches)'. It's printed in an edition of 15. I'm delighted to have completed it :>

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.

Upscaling

I find my work is getting larger and larger as the MA continues. This is image is a current work in progress. The actual size is approx 180 x 42 cm but I can envision this growing some more! I recently made some screen prints on the largest bed in the print studio so now I'm tempted to make something really massive. I want to create a continuous landscape/cityscape using printed and hand made techniques, and use digital animation techniques to unfold some sort of narrative within the panorama.

Book binding

I've just completed an evening course in book binding at the London College of Communication. Over the 10 weeks we learned 7 different styles of binding.

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.