Summer Camp, Week 2

Tonight's adventure in the 4-week series of art explorations at 4 different art non-profits:  MN Center for Book Arts on Washington Ave.  It's located in the Open Book facility, along with The Loft for writers, Milkweed Editions publishers and others who support and give life to the written word.  In three hours, our group marbled paper and then used it to cover a simple post-bound book.

I haven't marbled paper for over 15 years, since I took a community ed class that was a huge amount of fun.  I've never pursued it at home because I thought it would be too messy, but I had such a great time tonight that I'll soon invest in a few supplies and enjoy a messy day.

 Here are a few pix of the process:

A tray is prepared, holding water mixed with carrageenan, the colloidal part of seaweed, which is also used as an emulsifer and stabilizer for foods, cosmetics and other things.  Here it provides a stable surface on which I can drop ink or -- in this case -- diluted acrylic paint.  We all used the same 4 colors: white, red, yellow and blue.  We had a variety of colors of good-quality construction paper on which to print (no white, so the paper color had quite an impact on the effect of the paint.)  Paper is pre-dipped in water mixed with alum, then dried, before it's ready for our use.

I then used a piece of wood with fairly widely separated nails and raked it through the spots of color, first toward me, then away from me.

I think I could have stopped here and had a gorgeous design, but it's all about experimentation!

Additional raking with increasingly closer-mounted tines, and done in the opposite direction,  adds more detail.

And more detail...

And then I printed it on dark blue paper.  It's then rinsed off and hung to dry.

This shot shows the wooden rakes and another experiment where I not only began with two different sorts of paint pools, but after raking I swirled through the design with a stick.

And here's that piece, printed on red paper, drying.

It was really amazing how different all of our papers were, given that we were using the same four colors.

Here are my two best papers (the ones you just watched being "born."  I chose to use them as the front and back covers for the book...

... which you see here. The blue is the top cover.

We were given a bookplate for the inside, and I added a scrap of each color inside the front and back.  The inside is filled with plain white paper, held on the two posts (whose backs are visible on the left side of the book-tape binding.)

Our instructor, Emily, gave us many useful pointers, and I'm eager to give this a try at home.  I loved making the stitched books during my retreat at St. John's last summer, but I never assembled the equipment I needed to make more.  This version seems much easier!

Next Tuesday's session is at the Minnesota Textile Center.