Prompt Challenge – Page 3 – Green Chair Press Blog

Prompt Challenge: Coruscate

The December word for my book group was appropriate for the holiday season: coruscate

verb: to emit vivid flashes of light; sparkle, scintillate, gleam, a striking display of brilliance or wit

The books people brought to our meeting were quite diverse. One was a book made of scraps of joss paper, painted mylar, and other bright paper, full of memories about the projects that used those paper. Another was a riff on “golden,” like golden child, golden rule, golden apple… And one person brought all the “bright and shiny” books on her book shelf, many artists books that she found witty and brilliant.
Since I’ve been thinking about “artist’s in a box” as a theme for making my matchboxes, I thought I’d concentrate on an artist that had “striking displays of brilliance or wit.” My first thought was Magritte, with his painting “La trahison des images” (The Treachery of Images), about which Magritte said

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe”, I’d have been lying

Here’s my response to Magritte’s painting:

The Treachery of Images

A couple of notes about making this…
+ The reaction from my group was that some didn’t recognize the metal thing sticking out of the box as a “pipe.” My husband suggested that I bend the metal to a sort of curved L shape.

+ After I was done, I belated thought “Does ‘pipe’ have a double meaning in French, as in English” — is “pipe” the word for both the thing one smokes and a conduit of water. Turns out no, the word for “conduit” in French is “tuyau” Maybe I should have written the words in English (This is a pipe) rather than French? Anyone have anything to say about this?

+ Lastly, the font. Magritte’s words are hand-written on the painting, and I used them for the inside of the box. But the title on the cover? I found a similar (free!) font—Little Days—which had the same p (which I thought would be the hardest to replicate).

Prompt Challenge: Caboodle

The monthly word for my prompt challenge group is

caboodle: noun (Informal) :the lot, pack, or crowd. Syn: assemblage

Suzanne, who’s in the group, has been encouraging me to get away from using the computer to do my design work, so I decided to concentrate on the synonym, assemblage. This reminded me immediately of the black sculptures of Louise Nevelson—they fascinated me as a kid and I have a postcard of her work tacked up on my bulletin board from an exhibit I went to a few years ago. Since I’ve been working in miniature with my matchbox books, I did a little homage to Nevelson—all hand-cut paper and messy glue stick.

Not quite done with the word, I also made a matchbox-sized book of color study collages around the Ornette Coleman quote “one must zig zag unless there is a circle”

Prompt Challenge: Agglutinate

The word for our group prompt challenge this month was agglutinate:

verb tr., intr.:
1. To form words by combining words or word elements.
2. To join or become joined as if by glue.
3. To clump or cause to clump, as red blood cells.

I went straight for the 2nd definition as it seemed like a good bookbinding term! For 5 years, I edited the quarterly magazine for a book arts group in California. The part I liked the best was doing the layout (soliciting articles, not so much). And I miss the layout challenges. So my plan for agglutinate was to make a zine or small magazine about glue.
Glue is messy, and I tried to incorporate that into my zine. But old habits and preferences are hard to break, and the pages are pretty block-y and standard.
Here’s the cover, followed by the table of contents and then one of the spreads. I did have a good time writing the little articles and thinking about all my own glue messes. Especially the time my husband and I installed a glue-down floor in my studio—the glue was thick mucus looking stuff and, as glue will, it got everywhere. But it didn’t help that I absently stepped on the glue brush in my stocking feet, getting glue all over the floor and in my own shoe.

The Glue Issue

TOC for The Glue Issue

The Glue Issue

A book that demonstrates the progression of time

Given the prompt “a book that demonstrates the progression of time,” Molly Brooks made a carousel book in a tribute to Doctor Who. She says “i did digital drawings of each actor that had portrayed him at time of binding (10), each paired with an image of the evolving interior of his spaceship. the blue hard-case is debossed to resemble the exterior of the spaceship, a blue phonebox.” Here’s the book. See more of Molly’s book work here. {First seen here.}

Group Prompt Challenge

Last February I asked 2 friends here in Santa Fe to do a monthly word-based prompt challenge with me. One of us would select a word the first of the month and then we’d get together toward the end of the month to show the books we’d made, inspired by the word. I was first to pick, using the OED word-of-the-day:

mim, adj. and adv. Reserved or restrained in manner or behaviour, esp. in a contrived or priggish way; affectedly modest, demure; primly silent, quiet; affectedly moderate or abstemious in diet (rare). Also (occas.) of a person’s appearance.

I read quite a bit of poetry before finding this early (1858) Emily Dickinson poem:

Snow flakes.

I counted till they danced so
Their slippers leaped the town–
And then I took a pencil
To note the rebels down–
And then they grew so jolly
I did resign the prig–
And ten of my once stately toes
Are marshalled for a jig!

(It’s also one of only a handful of poems that Dickinson titled.) I liked the idea of counting snowflakes, which seems like such an impossible task. I imagined Dickinson keeping a ledger book of snowflake tallies, but getting carried away as she starts to do her little jig.

Here’s my book, made to look like a ledger and using the Emily Austin font I bought several years ago. This font comes with ink blots, which you can see in the final picture below, as I imagine Dickinson getting more and more excited about the snow flakes.

Prompt Challenge: Birds and em-dashes (part 4)

Model completed, front

After playing around with a folded double-sided accordion for a while, it dawned on me that the 2 poems were short enough to do the accordion with a single sheet (thus no bulky seams). While I liked the idea of the double folded accordion, Mohawk Superfine doesn’t fold very well in the non-grain direction (it cracks). The Mohawk sheets I have are 25″ long in the grain direction, and I laid out the pages and artwork so that it would all fit in that length. Here’s what I did for this model…
This is the sheet before cutting. It’s printed on my ink jet. The black areas are for the stained glass windows. The L-shaped registration marks on the ends are for the cutting plotter. For this model, the back of the sheet is unprinted, however if I editioned this book, I’d letterpress print the second poem on the back.

Sheet before cutting

Here’s the sheet after cutting.

Cutouts for the back of the accordion The next step is to print the windows on rice paper, and glue them to the back in the correct spots. Then cover the windows on the back with another cutout—made of thin black paper. I think of these cutouts as the lead in the stained glass–there they are to the right.

The picture below shows the back in progress. The left-most bird is covered by the tissue and the black cut out, the middle one just has the tissue, and the right-most has nothing.

Affixing the images to the back

Once the windows are finished, I trim the paper, fold the accordion and attach the cover. Here’s the finished front:

Model completed, front

the back

Model completed, back

Model cover To make the book work in one 25″ long sheet, I sized it at 3-1/2″x5-1/4″. This is the cover. There’s a tab at the end of the accordion with the same detail as the cover decoration, but it’s loose & facilitates pulling the folds out. (You can see this tab in the photos above–it’s next to the red bird.)
Making models helps me in numerous ways. I’ve made 6 so far for this project and suspect there will be a few more. It can be tedious, but with each one I see something to improve or change as well as understand more about what it would take to edition the book.
I’m pleased with this model—it folds well and I quite like the way the light comes through the windows. Yet to be worked on: the cover paper I chose is too flimsy and something beefier is called for.