Today is World Book Day

In years past, some of the kiddies passing my windows on the way to school on World Book Day have been wearing costumes of their favourite characters from books, so I kept an eye out this morning. As it's quite chilly, most were wearing their warm coats but a few were definitely dressed up underneath -

These sisters were the first to go by, probably not in costume but setting what came
to be a theme of this collection of photos - ENERGY

Lots of energy here ...

... and a better view of the costume 

Boundless energy!

More of the same...

Finally, signs of a costume - can you see the black tail with the white tip?

The prize for the best costume goes to ... Robin Hood!

In this video, kids dressed as characters interview their authors - good stuff (especially "Freddy" -

Included were the Varjak Paw books, which have amazing illustrations (by Dave McKean) -

Poetry Thursday - a bit of Don Juan by Lord Byron

London chimneys producing that "dun cupola" (via)

A mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping,
Dirty and dusky, but wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amid the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tiptoe, through the sea-coal canopy;
A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool’s head — and there is London Town!

Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan’

Started in 1818, Don Juan is a long, digressive, satiric epic poem, unfinished at Byron's death in 1824 and regarded as his masterpiece. Byron reversed the legend of Don Juan, portraying him not as a womaniser but as someone easily seduced by women.

Prononunciation of "Juan" may seem strange to Spanish speakers - in this poem it rhymes with "true one" - indeed throughout, the pronunciation of foreign words is in the English manner, as the rhymes make clear.

Part of the manuscript held by the Pierpont Morgan Library (via)

"Byron's manuscript of Don Juan reveals a fluid hand, the author often working with minimal revision to achieve a swift, conversational pace despite the complexity of his chosen rhyme scheme, ottava rima. Shortly after composing the first canto, page of which is shown here, Byron added several dozen stanzas to the poem. He then recopied some of the new stanzas crosswise, in a neat and regular hand, directly over the first draft. "The bore of copying it out is intolerable," he told a friend after completing the first canto, "and if I had an amanuensis he would be of no use, as my writing is so difficult to decipher." "

Soundbites are here, or read the book-length version courtesy of Project Gutenberg here. In less than an hour and a half, you can listen to Canto I (of 17), pleasantly read, here. There are laugh-aloud moments, and the rhymes are a more quiet sort of fun - you hold your breath to hear what he's going to rhyme, sometimes. For instance, with intellectual ... nowadays he'd surely find a way to use metrosexual, a word not available 200 years ago ...

'T is pity learned virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education,
Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred,
Grow tired of scientific conversation:
I don't choose to say much upon this head,
I 'm a plain man, and in a single station,
But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual,
Inform us truly, have they not hen-peck'd you all?

Need a bookmark? get folding!

The written instructions for making these "weaved origami bookmarks", though detailed, don't make the process entirely plain, so you might want to check any points of difficulty on this video.

the first two examples, from paper printed on both sides

these are made with 1/2" strips, cut lengthways from A4 paper

They're very quick to make once you get the hang of it. The ends can be tucked in, or held with glue ... depending how much of the strip is left once it can no longer be plaited.

This is a very simple example of straw plaiting - by overlapping strips to insert new ones, you can make this as long as you want.

Actual straw plaiting - from here  should you need information on making your own straw bonnet! -

And to take another diversion ... if you want to fold all sorts of interesting 3D shapes, visit this site -

Portraiture class, week 7

This week was about setting up the pose for the next weeks, till the end of the course. We had a chance to draw either or both models quickly in several poses - heads only or bodies also - then conferred on where they should sit and how they should be lit.

I seem to fall back on the charcoal technique of making the background grey, then adding darks and subtracting lights -

adding the darks

taking away the lights

too much forehead... but mostly the angle of the head is wrong

a pose for three further weeks

Continuing with "museum labyrinth"

Thinking about how to display the maze-book ... What would be ideal is for people to be able to pick it up and "walk" through it, but given that displays are usually Don't Touch situations, a different approach is needed.

The red circles show which sides show when the book is unfolded and simply sitting there -

On the other side, drawings of various types of floors - and some quickly-stitched legs at the top of each double page -

 The result is that the legs appear in different orientations when the book is simply sitting there -

and, left to its own devices, the book shoes different sides of the pages -

Some experiments with it "simply sitting there" and letting the light shine through -

These have been printed on one side of the page, and the paper then waxed -

Adding a stiff cover helps the book stand up but you lose the transparent effect of the first and last pages -

Finally, an assemblage of six sheets (spiral cut; there would be six photos on each page) -

It hasn't been properly printed; I'm thinking about how some pages could be laid out - for a proper view, as it were - and others folded up to (perhaps) give the impression of maze-like turnings.

"How will it be displayed" is an important question - and needs to be considered at the outset, rather than after the object is made.

While blog-hopping I found a "labyrinth" quilt (here) -

The pattern is Kathy Doughty's Red Centre and the quilt was made by Jess (surname not given).

Also (somewhat) coincidentally ... ideas from my latest book purchase, "500 handmade books volume 2", which I am enjoying slowly, many pages not closely examined yet -

"Walking in the City" by Maria Rogal
- interesting angle and orientation, focusing on "the walking"

From Mira Ylonen's "R.O.M.A. Artists Book Series" (shown in Helsinki) -
the fabric behaves rather like the paper of the books I dipped in
porcelain slip and fired

"49 Masterpieces of Art"  by Will Karp
The squares in the maze book measure 4.5" 

The "49 Masterpieces" fold up into a nice little box

The meandering dominoes in Mary C Leto's "Daily Wants: Dominoes"
are saying something ... possibly tangential ...

(This post is linked to Off The Wall Friday.)

Atmospherics

from one side of the house

from the other side 

From the photo archives - trainside landscape

Pix taken as Eurostar whizzed through the landscape (southern England, northern France) -

When I take these photos, I'm looking for a certain blur ... the zoom is set at about 3x, to make that happen. It's amazing how often a line-side pole gets into the photo, even when they're spaced far apart. Also I'm looking for some sort of surprise. And it's a way of capturing the ever-changing sky ... the wish or need to do so must be a metaphor for something?

Art quilts I like - Steven Driscoll Hixson

Steven Driscoll Hixson's "urban erosion" quilts are currently on show in Chicago - get a better look at the ones in the photo on the gallery website, lillstreetgallery.com.

Inspired by the challenge of walking in an urban landscape, they are very graphic (he does teach graphic design, after all), partly due to the strong colours of the design - and reach out to us not just through their visual impact but because of the familiarity of the experience, changing the hard anonymous surfaces of the city into the warm surface of individual textiles. A nice translation of materials, with a certain tension to it.

From his website: "Steven Driscoll Hixson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Indiana University - Bloomington. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the Foundation for International Education - London, UK, and Purdue University.

"Design and printmaking provide a balance for Hixson in his passion to execute landscapes and narratives through integrated brand strategies, retail environments, and textile signage systems. " 

Drawing at the V&A

Maybe it's because the V&A is so big and contains so many objects, beautiful interesting objects ... it's hard to find something to draw!

For instance, in the Japanese gallery I couldn't settle to choosing an object - and ended up with an entire caseful -

My self-imposed task was to use the coloured pencils in my drawing bag, which get carried around but hardly ever used.

After drawing and colouring from the comfort of the sketching stool, I had a close look at the further objects - and got some surprises!

From the dramatic gloom of the Jewellery gallery, I took away Cynthia Cousen's "twig necklace" -

It was an experiment in using biro, and I enjoyed the mindless addition of hatching. This is a gorgeous piece, made in patinated silver ... one would need new clothes to wear it with (and as they say, "beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes").

Found in the February photo files

The mysterious object found in a recent photograph -

turns out, after some head-scratching and prodigious feats of contextual memory, to be from Helen Parrott's mark-making book, which is at the top of my to-buy list. The photo was taken during the textiles-into-ceramics class, so thanks to Wolfgang for bringing it along to class. 

Helen's use of marks - especially the long loopy linen thread that "wrote" its way diagonally across some of her early quilts - has been inspirational to me, and these lines in her long sketchbook give me ideas for ways of taking my "travel lines" into the context of walking ... it's not hard to imagine having the paper and pencil in a pocket, moving in rhythm with the feet and taking up the irregularities of the ground.

Untitled, 2009 (via Little Gem Quilts)

From February 2012, a strange structure in the grounds of Camberwell's Wilson Road site -