Textures and Patterns #9.

Surface patterns on a large rock near our house. Beautiful in a wabi-sabi kind of way. 

Rumours.

I have  always been fascinated by the ways rumours are created and spread, and how we, who have not been involved in the original incident or event, will with complete sincerity and conviction, retell a rumour as the absolute truth, in the process maybe adding an imagined detail or two. Here are two new dry point etchings I have finished over the past two weeks. I am planning a series of three - I am busy working on the last one.  I am copying existing vintage images, and placing them in the context of the creation and spreading of rumours.

Rumours I (drypoint etching).  Thanks to Svetlana for providing me with the text for this one.

Rumours II (dry point etching). I have taken a particular rumour found on the Internet, and calculated its information content using Shannon's formula.

A tribute to Blossfeldt.

I finally finished this book. I constructed the book in a workshop a few years ago, then painted the pages, and finally selected ten of the photographs in the Taschen book to draw. The text is from the same publication.

The Games We Play (cont.).

This is the last etching in the series - Sprout. For the rules, see here.

I have also started printing the others on proper (beautiful!) etching paper. Here is the Battleships one. Must still number and sign it ...

I have already started with a new series, called Rumour. I have done a test print of the first one, but then decided to add some dotted lines and arrows. What can I say -  I love numbers, graphs, dotted lines and arrows. I am a bit weird that way. Can't wait to show you when it is done - next week I hope!

Paper.

When I was a little girl of about 7, I had this dream of making my own paper. I had read about the history of paper and in particular of papyrus, and I remember sitting in the back yard dismally pounding some leaves with a stone in the hope that somehow it would be magically transformed into a sheet of paper. It was a depressing experience. A year or two later I read a description of making hand made paper, probably in an encyclopaedia, or perhaps in my Dad's old Reader's Digest DIY manual. I remember seeing the picture of the deckle and the vat of pulp and a press for flattening the paper and realising that this was definitely beyond my capabilities. So I shelved my dream.
Yesterday, 45 years later, I made my first sheets of paper in a workshop with Colleen Ross. I made a simple basic deckle using two wooden photo frames with a piece of netting stapled on. I had torn my pieces of paper and soaked them the day before the workshop. (See the link for photos of the process). Once home the cotton sheets with paper on them were still somewhat damp, so I used my clothes drying rack to dry them.

When dry, they peel off quite easily.

In this batch I added ink with a dropper (1 and 3) and a spray (2).

Here I added scraps of Indian paper (1 and 3) and coffee (2).

Adding dried plant material (1 and 3) and raffia (2).
And what did I use to make the pulp? Leftover photocopies from the Nightmare Editing Project, of course!

Life without Lipstick.

"What is life without lipstick?" she mused.
"Indeed," said Birdie, "it certainly adds a little glamour to life."
"Do you make yours of crushed beetles, like Cleopatra did?" she asked.
"Oh, please! That is so B.C." replied Birdie. "Chanel is absolutely the only way to go."