What I Have Been Up To Lately

Saturday was the first of 4 weeks of taking Suhita Shirodkar’s class called People Alive. The class is on Zoom and she is a well organized and good instructor. The first week is about capturing silhouettes and adding details with an emphasis on less being more. You would use these types of people in the back of a urban sketch. It’s a continuation on my overall project to work on figuring drawing. 

I only play with watercolor occasionally and it's been at least 12 months since I've picked them up, which has added some additional challenges. In Saturday's class, there were 3 building blocks to the overall concept we were learning, which means I can focus on one new building block for 2 days before moving on. This is the best example I have so far of a simple silhouette with some details added. Tomorrow's new concept is to work in more than one color.

Yes, it's an elderly couple leaning towards each other and walking together. 

The other thing I've been up to is tearing down paper for pamphlets and finishing several pamphlets.  Both of these are approximately 8” x 6” with one in "portrait mode” and one in “landscape mode”. Both contain Arches Text Wove paper. The covers were made from a full sheet of linen card stock paper. The texture mostly comes from several layers using bubble wrap. 

I don't think I've ever met a bright color combination that I don't like.

A New Pursuit

I signed up for Roz Stendahl's online class on making a simple round spine book. This class is only offered once per year, so I leaped and signed up for it. Roz is interested in people being able to make simple books at home without fancy equipment.

Today, I tore down my paper using a bone folder. There were two sheets of 40 inch by 26 inch paper, which were torn into pieces of approximately 5 inches by 13 inches. Each piece was folded in half so that the final dimension was around 6.5 inches wide. The process is fascinating in building a tear diagram so that your final folds are on the grain and also getting the two different sides of the paper to match when you build your signatures (stacks of paper).

In spite of watching the videos and practicing on some other paper, my initial tears were a bit sloppy. The top picture is my first tear. The next picture was in the middle of tearing up my paper. The bottom picture is one of my final tears.

The other thing I learned was to be careful about making a crease on the edge of the folded paper. While her instruction was spot on, several times, I was not as careful as I should have been. 

Once I started the mantra of "gentle, gentle" in my head, I didn't have this happen again.