Studio Saturday - micro-sorting leads to discoveries

The day started out with a little sorting, to find some silky bits for urgent repairs to the lining of a venerable (favourite) jacket -

It's looking a bit chaotic! 

and immediately spread to sorting through a few little bags that had found their way into the scrap drawer - a drawer that is currently just half full. Or, is now half empty. (I'm trying to keep only those that "spark joy", rather than used it to dump all leftovers into.) (And many of the tiny scraps do act as "sparks" either to inspire or to add visual fizz.)

The bags yielded some tiny grey scraps which cried out to be laid out and maybe stitched down, and also the lovely ikats that Mags Ramsay sent last year, or maybe the year before?, to be used as book covers for the woodblock prints I was doing then. It's especially good to come across them at this moment, as I'm laying aside the "water" woodblock for a while and would like a different subject ...

... why not ikat ....

One thing led to another and before I knew it the search for a little bag of pieces of bondawebbed silk turned into a "hmm what's on this high shelf" sorting/chucking experience. Many encounters with old work, drawings from various courses that have been kept for years, for instance. Some people would advise getting rid of them - their value was in the doing and the initial reflection on them - but I find it helpful to come across old work and look again. Who knows, it may be vital in sparking a new project...

From that high shelf, some byproducts of the Colour Dictionary project - 

To fit the loose pages into a folder I had to trim them down and this brought on thoughts along the lines of "if it's worth keeping it's worth keeping it nice", which takes us back to "why not throw it out right away and save all that bother", and to more thoughts of how our storage needs, indeed our need to hang on to things, changes over the years. Many people have told me, "I got ride of lots of things and haven't missed any of them" - and I'm sure they're right. Having to remember what's in the cupboards is an art in itself: less is more, yet again. It seems that so many of us struggle with this - and those books about decluttering are simply not applicable to tools and materials we use to make art or craft.

The original painting of the pages of the dictionary was finished in 2013, but there were spinoffs in 2015. I loved having this project to work on every day, "doing my dictionary stint" every morning, and before long it was done and then the thinking had to start again!

Not much thought went into this big (A3) sketchbook also found on the shelf -

... just random blobs of colour, any old marks, a bit of thread stitched on some pages...

The series of cutouts, page after page, looked great in someone else's sketchbook, but she already had a proper subject and the cutouts enhanced that. Just goes to show how important it is to know what you're doing, ie, having a clear intention.

 It did yield some ideas on the "Ikat" theme -

 Also found: a bag of book-making ingredients for taking along on a long train journey (sometime...). The little stitched books were great fun back in 2011 but aren't really where I'm at, at the moment. And - dare I say - probably are not something I'll go back to. But never say never... I do like to keep the options open, to keep hope alive ...

Also rediscovered, the directions for Single Boards Binding, as demonstrated by Anna Yevtukh-Squire, and a postcard with an image by Vanessa Godfrey which stirs up a few ideas for other woodblock subjects (thanks, Mags). 

All that by 9am. After breakfast, the tidy-up led out of the studio and to the drawer full of greetings cards and letters received over the decades. Sometimes they get weeded out and in making a bit of space I found one letter dated 2002. The weeding is not systematic, and the very thought of doing the whole drawer in one go is overwhelming.

 In that drawer was the little notebook I used for making countless lists when packing up the house in Halifax NS in 1982 before returning to England. This little drawing ("North West Arm") brings back a lot of memories of the two years living there -

 On another page are some things my 6 year old son wanted to know:
- are there poisonous spiders in England
- how do nettles sting you
- what is donkey's poo called
- how do trees grow
(Answers on a postcard please.)

Somewhere I have a (small) collection of "historic" paper bags, which will bite the dust when it surfaces - this one from the drawer is gone already -

Faced with the prospect of spending all day on various sorts of sorting in different parts of the studio, without obvious outcome, I focused on the "dump corner" of the workbench, the area near the door where things end up (every home has one). That heap of papers has been resisting decimation for months now -

 Some mark-making hit the bin -

 ... and some usefully empty bags emerged from the other side of the room, but that heap of papers is still only reduced by half. The shoebox is collection all my pens and pencils and is on the list for sorting "someday soon" -

Which leaves a couple of tasks for today and tomorrow - glueing a few broken bowls etc -

and the fun of making a little stuffed toy from a pattern (more of a shape than a pattern) found in that heap of papers. It's a sort of giraffe with a loopy mane, and I'm giving it four legs rather than two

Not that the grandbaby needs any more toys -

Colourful files

To put an end to yesterday's dithering, I turned a lot of these -

to this format -

The cropping was made easier by being able to set the measurements, which then applied to each subsequent photo -

It's important to change the file names, so the original is preserved. Also I wanted to easily link with the original photo - but what I did wasn't the best method: by taking off some of the camera's ID of the photo (eg, P1480844 became 0844) I ended up with a jumble of files, which I printed out (on a monochrome laser printer) so as to be able to make notes by the simple expedient of writing on the sheet -

Next task was to put the files into "alphabetical" order ... which I did by copying them into a new folder and removing the photo numbers from the file names That left the headwords from the starting and stopping pages from each day's work, and also the page numbers.

This process found at least one duplicate, and quite a lot of missing sections. So there was a point in keeping the numbers ... it made it easier to find photos that didn't have further description, of which there were several.

At that point I ran out of time. Not quite sure what format this will take, or even if all the photos will be used, but it's starting to take some sort of shape.

Colour dictionary: into the future

Scurrying to make some new work for the book fair - 14 November, a date that's coming ever closer.

First step is to spread out the materials and see what they suggest -

In 2013, when I spent August painting each page a freshly-mixed colour, I photographed each day's output and subsequently printed those photos in a somewhat long accordion book. Perhaps those photos could be cropped or ...?? The focus is on the range of colour. Or is it?

Also, I was using a sheet of paper each day under the bottom of the pages, on which some of the paint gathered in an orderly manner - how could that be used?

 In the files I found some that had been joined together -

 Maybe the entire set could make one long scroll - the photos are there, ready to resize and trim and layer together -

The actual dictionary is still in a damaged state. The choice is either to repair it, or to use the spine as a place for ... something ... pigment names, perhaps -

What about a pastiche? Having visited a Farrow & Ball paint shop recently, and picked up a colour chart - with its explanations of the often-unusual names they've given the colours -

Sample of colours with interesting names (via)

... I'm thinking of making a similar chart, sampling colours from the photos and using the headwords from the relevant pages as colour names. Would it matter if, after photography and printing, they weren't exactly the colours on the dictionary page? (Short answer: no.)

The format would be foldable, on heavy paper, rather like the F&B chart. It wouldn't have quite this many colours though - 

(via)

Or would it? Maybe it needs (12x11, what's that?) ... 132 colours to be interesting? Or is the interest in the colours' strange names - how can that be developed?

Other thoughts, other possibilities - maybe it's time to use these colourful papers in some way -

... or dig these out, and get to work on a few more -

That would be a complete change of plan, but is worth considering.

The more I look in my photo files, and at past blog posts, the more confusing it gets. Oh, the dithering! 

Playing cards, continued

A new pack, in sunset colours -

Random painting

Somewhat sorted

Edge-on

Back to the colour dictionary

The painted dictionary has been lying on the corner of the table for weeks, awaiting photography of certain pages. Awaiting, also, a cohesive idea….

Meanwhile here are some snaps of page ranges, showing one of the headwords and bits of the colours they ended up as. (The captions list the colours added to the previous page to make the new colour.) The combination of headword + added colour will make colour names … but the colour they "define" won't actually be the colour you expect (if that makes sense?) 

(399 naples yellow; 401 yellow; 403 yellow; 405 yellow;
407 yellow + emerald; 409 emerald; 411 emerald)

 This results in names like Egregious Yellow and Emplacement Emerald ...

(473 payne's grey; 475 yellow light hanse; 477 yellow; 479 titanium white;
481 payne's grey; 483 mixing white+ payne's grey)

… First Grey and Fizgig Yellow ...

(651 ultramarine+red oxide; 653 red oxide; 655 red oxide;
657 titanium white; 659  mixing white; 661 naples yellow)

… Insult Red and Intersidereal White.

Are these strange names - which have arisen by chance - all that far away from those chosen by the paint companies from the efforts of focus groups - names like Coastal Glow ... Lunar Falls (both off-white); Sunflower Symphony ... Sulphur Springs ... Sunburst symphony (brown shading to yellow); Atmosphere ... Favourite China (greyish paleish blues) - those are from Dulux. Farrow & Ball has some wonderful - and so historic! - names: Pointing ... Clunch ... Ringwold Ground ... Cornforth White ... Lamp Room Grey ... Picture Gallery Red ... Eating Room red ... Hound Lemon ... Churlish Green ...

Each with it own name!

Carrying on with the colour dictionary

Having made the folding book of photos of the pages of the dictionary, I started glueing together the "fans" of pages

into a spiral, with disappointing results - it was simply too solid. However, it could be twisted into this sort of thing -

Following the "carry it through to the end" rule of art-making research, I persevered and glued all the pages together -

Cutting out the circles involved lining up the centres, holding it all together, and cutting a circle through all layers, which left something quite interesting -

that was further trimmed to get a snake-like object -

The circle needed its centre opening up so it would behave more like the "snake" -

 I haven't cut enough out of the centre, but it's starting to be more like the graceful spiral I imagined -

 It was seeing the configuration of the cut-off that has given me an idea for another possible configuration -

Now it's a matter of printing out the pages again, and trying again.

Beyond the painted dictionary

This concertina book gathers the information about the painted dictionary in one place. It was made by taking photos and captions from the blog and fitting them into a template for having 8 pix on a sheet of paper - this reduced the size of the images, which have a maximum dimension of 600 pixels, so they would print clearly. 

Spot the too-small photo ... it will be replaced

It's only compiled as far as P at the moment; the rest will have to wait till next week.

Could these be joined into some sort of continuous spiral?