Monday, October 18, 2010

Robert's Book... Making of

To avoid wasting the voyage time of the Robert's book between Dana and myself, I decided to use some time last Saturday to do my part. 
And as in a surrealistic history the book is ready even before arriving here :-))
When the book gets here I can use only a few hours doing the assembling and sending the book to Omar. He is now also doing something similar (yes we have a small conspiracy in favor of speed  :-))) so that the book will be even  richer for the exhibit at Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA).  
Omar also will not stay that long without seeing a book, so I imagine that this will keep everyone happy.
We've done the accounts during the weekend and we believe that this way the book reaches Marty Harris before the end of November (Using express shippment).

Is it a bit daring and challenging? Yessss, we are artists !!! :-)))

Now and in the coming days I will publish photos of the whole process and this might be interesting to see how I create and produce these small jobs in his books :-) And how is this fun for me :-))

1- The first step is the idea, it seems too obvious, but I always like to think of ideas that fit in the available time, in this case was within a day.  
I also decided to make his portrait on the original moleskine paper, so cut out a page from an old notebook (the paper is thin and easy to assemble later). At this stage I choose the photo and other references that I'll use.
I wanted to use acrylics in Robert's portrait, but to my self portrait I thought of something to express some of my current "blue feelings" and I decided to use an x-ray film to make a collage. 
I cut the Robert's picture in the same proportion of moleskine page, it is helpful to use the photo as reference
  
2 - The choice of x-ray film for my self portrait determined the color palette for the Robert's portrait. 
Basically it's almost a black and white" palette , but I do not use black on my palette, my gray is born from the breaking complementary colors (in the middle of the plate). In that case I used Prussian blue, burnt sienna and a little bit of red oxide.This approaching cold gray tones of a  x-ray film . (I took these from the same color palette study of a larger work I am doing).
Tomorrow I'll tell you more :-))

2 comments:

Tim Clary said...

This sounds really interesting! Looking forward to seeing more of what you're up to.

Dana said...

o0o0o this is cool!