Bookmaking and Japanese Stab binding at The Old Printing Works.

On a Saturday workshop at The Old Printing Works, Thornton, I learned the art of Japanese Stab binding for making notebooks/sketchbooks and any other kind of book you'd like to call it!
We also learned how to create a protective hardcover for our book set. The easiest way for me to describe it, is to show you.
Here, from opening to closing, is my very own effort at making these beautiful pieces of art. Artistic, they most definitely are!

The closed book

first flap open

both flaps open with books inside

both flaps open with books removed

the three note books

a close up of the stab binding on each

back in their protective cover

and flaps closing

all snug as a bug!

I hope you've enjoyed this visual tour of my latest piece of art.. a deviation from painting, but oh so useful for me to create sketchbooks!

Thanks to Marion Archibald from The Old Printing Works, Thornton for such a wonderful, creative day.
If you'd like to see their website, go HERE

Arty fun with recycled Christmas wrapping paper

Christmas comes and there are presents, covered in wrapping paper.
This year I decided to recycle some of my wrapping paper, in an artistic way.

Firstly, I tore the paper into strips

and then I took a cheap canvas, which already had a picture on it - and painted over that with white emulsion.

Once that was done, I took my strips and applied them in a random way to the canvas, using PVA glue.

Just LOOK what the end result was!

This was great fun to create - and an inventive way to recycle my wrapping paper!

Call of the Wild

or Hoe, Hoe, Hoe!

Spring is well and truly here, the weather has improved no end, we are seeing sunshine and a multitude of weeds coming up in the garden!
Weeds - so many of the little blighters - and all needs removing so I can enjoy the pretty flowers without them being choked.

The quandary for a gardening artist... to paint or weed? Weeding won this weekend and now the garden is beginning to show its treasures - and there are more opportunities to photograph the fleeting flowers for later use in paintings.

Gardening reminds me a lot of painting.
There are paintings which are like evergreens, always there and always loved as they give a backbone and structure to the look of my house.


There are other paintings, which are beautiful when I make them - but are always destined to brighten up someone else's life - like gorgeous flowering perennials they brighten my day- but become evergreens in a different climate - the home they were meant to live in.


And then there are the weeds. How can paintings be weeds, you ask?
Weeds are only plants you don't want in your garden at that time.
Many herbalists would love to have dandelions and cleavers growing, as though weeds to most of us, they are useful little plants, with medicinal purposes.

So it is with many paintings and sketches. They are useful little things - they help me improve my techniques no end. But if I hung them all, you wouldn't see my great ones for the multitude. Of course - just like dandelions - they are great to someone else!


So even when I garden, painting is not far from my mind.
Both are enjoyable and creative.

I hope you managed to do whatever was enjoyable and creative to you, this past weekend.