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Inspired by type samplers I’ve seen over the years, I decided to create one for my collection.
If your browser won’t load the image, click here to be taken to the digital file.
The hard copy is 240 x 92mm, printed on two weights of Kraft paper and hand-sewn in a horizontal format. If you would like to purchase a copy, wave your mouse over the top of this page to find the red drop-down Duckshop link. Or contact me directly.
For images of the production, have a look at my letterpress flickr set. For the story of its production, click here.
Building up a letterpress studio with minimal funds is a slow process that often depends upon luck and opportunity. It’s a lot easier when people are aware that you exist; I get offered type and machines regularly now, but when I first started it was a very different scenario.
My first ever purchase was a small Adana tabletop platen press that came with a cabinet of type, advertised on the internet. My father and I drove up to the Southern Highlands to collect it, and I was really excited to see all the trays, even though they were faces that make me groan now: lots of 6pt script faces and decorative fonts, obviously for printing business cards and invitations. I also got lots of rusty dye-cutting blades and mystery objects, the sort of stuff that lies in boxes around the studio and rarely gets used, if ever. I still have a few of those boxes, still waiting for me to take the time to really go through them. Being inexperienced, I didn’t know what to look for in a press. I still have that Adana, but it doesn’t have platen clips for the tympan padding, and I haven’t stirred myself to get some, so I haven’t got it working. It just graces a corner of the studio.
I didn’t need it because at the time I was working at the art school (I still work there) and I had presses to use when I could be there outside of work. So my collecting was quite casual because I had nowhere except my rickety old weatherboard garage to store things, and certainly no studio space.
A year or so later contacts I’d made from former jobs and studies contacted me about taking some type that was being deaccessioned from one of the local universities. That was two cabinets of usefulness, mostly Bodoni and Times.
Walking through a junk shop in the Blue Mountains yielded a gorgeous Adana tabletop 10 x 8 platen press in good working order for $600. I was nervous about the money but figured that if I’d found it on the internet, the shipping would have pushed it out of my league, so I took it home, pulled it apart carefully (a big line of newsprint with the pieces laid out and notated in the order they came apart), cleaned it up & touched up the paintwork, and then put it back together. I’m not a person who understands machines, and the fact that there was one washer left over made me very nervous. Apparently that leftover washer is a common occurrence, and it’s made no difference to the smooth operation of the press. You can see it working in this post.
I now have two proofing presses, although one (an Asbern) is stuck in a friend’s shed down in the far south coast of NSW where Dad and his ute managed to haul it in preference to getting it back up the very steep Brown Mountain after I bought it very cheap from a disguntled ex-partner of a printmaker who had left him and skipped the country. That purchase was sheer luck, and I was looking forward to using the Asbern whenever I got the space to house it, but when my art school ex-boss moved her studio from Braidwood to Canberra and decided that she didn’t really need a letterpress press that she’d never used, she asked would I like to buy it from her? Luckily I’d just sold off a polymer platemaker that I’d stashed in my garage and I had some funds, so that’s when the Vandercook SP-20 joined my stash. It was in pristine condition, and came to Canberra comparatively easily, so it’s been my working press ever since.
Here’s a view of my home garage, once I’d cleaned all the junk out that had surrounded the printing gear. This is the day it all got moved out into my new ANCA studio. The blue tarp is keeping the Vandercook nice and dry.
This is the ANCA studio when I first moved the press & type into it, c. 2009. The red table is a printer’s stone, which is a printing cabinet topped by a slab of steel which is hardy and flat and built for composing and planing formes before moving them onto the press. It was also in my ex-boss’s collection, and it came to me as well. Her husband had been using it in his carpentry studio, and the drawers were full of gorgeous whirly wood shavings! Cleaned out and repainted (with a coating of Penetrol for the top), it’s one of my most prized pieces.
I spent three years at ANCA, and halfway through that time I sold a few books and had some cash to spend, so decided to settle on a house font and buy some fresh type from M & H Typefoundry in the US. Choosing was really tough, but I eventually chose to supplement my few drawers of Garamond and Gill. The day it arrived was very exciting. The letters were so clean that I could handle them without getting the usual grotty fingers!
This is old type.
My first studio at ANCA was only temporary (you can use their wonderful facilities for a maximum of 6 years) and while I was there I had the opportunity to purchase a beautiful collection of type from the Finlay Press when they disbanded.
Much of the type had belonged to Alec Bolton of the Brindabella Press (that’s his handwriting on the labels). I was working with him when he died, and the typecases had originally been offered to me, but I was a new (and single) mother with few funds, and couldn’t take advantage of the offer. I will always be grateful to Ingeborg and Phil of the Finlay Press for deciding to offer it to me for the same price it was sold to them, all these years later.
So by the time my partner and I found a house with room for a home studio, I had a wonderful but unorganised collection of type. Moving it was, as usual, gruelling, and I’m also grateful to a wonderful local bunch of piano movers who, although outwardly cheerful whilst doing the job, gave a huge sigh as the last drawer slipped back into the last cabinet and they could go home and rest.
So now I’m firmly established in my home studio, and feeling that I have enough. I have seven cabinets of type, including a cabinet of wood type that, in the same way as the metal type, was collected in odds & sods over the internet and via people who know that I’m interested. I’ve started saying no to any offers except wood type (and an iron handpress, if I can find one with a frisket), because it’s really not how much you have, but what you do with it, and now that there’s no more moving on the horizon, it’s time to start really working again on long-term projects rather than the short choppy things I’ve managed to do over the last three years.
So this summer I set myself the project of getting all the type rearranged into a working order, establishing what I did and didn’t want (I’ve been passing on odd trays of type over the years too… the bulk of my Times went to Andrew Schuller’s Wyrdwynker (sp?) Press and various 6pt fonts have been given to ceramicists etc who can play with them in a non-printing craft context), and cataloguing them.
With the help of Mr Padge the Studio Cat, of course.
I have put together a type sampler, inspired by many others that I’ve seen over the years.
Old typesetters used to feature samples of large font sizes by setting words or phrases that would fit the space. I decided to do the same, which was surprisingly difficult since many of my wood faces haven’t got complete alphabets. It was a lot of fun, though, and I discovered lots of things about my collection, like the fact that one font (Tudor 12pt, I think) doesn’t have any cap Es, which is very frustrating, and I hope that they fell into one of the boxes of crap in the move, to be discovered later. Another typecase had some fantastic ornaments in the back row, which I moved into my already fantastic ornament case, inherited from the Brindabella/Finlay presses.
So now I feel a bit more organised, and my type sampler is going to make life a lot easier. Onwards and upwards!
The short answer lies here.
Otherwise:
The ANU School of Art has a special place in my heart. It, along with the Australian National University in general, is one of my life’s sacred sites. Way before I ever thought of going there (when I was doing an Arts degree in very non-art subjects), I lived in group houses with art students and earned money there by life modelling. When I discovered that they had a great letterpress set-up, and that letterpress was my destiny (it was really like that: a major epiphany weekend), I went to night classes at the school to build up a portfolio, and then I went to the school itself as a student. Straight after graduating, I was hired by the bit of the school that has a letterpress studio and I’ve been there ever since, teaching and helping. I even design their promotional flyers, some years.
Every year I see students that I think would be fun to work with. Sometimes they’ve been in one of my classes, sometimes I’ve just seen their work around the school and thought that it would translate well to print. That’s why I decided to join the Emerging Artist Support Scheme (EASS) which the school has in place to help students transition to a world without art school.
EASS is a bundle of fun, ranging from international scholarships to cash prizes to residencies. There are also collectors who happily use the scheme to get first pick of the work in the graduating exhibition, and they pay a premium on the prices to help with the cash prizes.
My contribution is a residency in my studio to make a letterpress broadside. Originally I thought that these would be very traditional in format: a piece of text either rendered completely typographically on the page or accompanied with imagery. The more it progresses, the less I care about the traditional idea. What I seem to be doing is giving these people access to my equipment with a ration of paper and seeing what happens — the only mandantory aspect is that they have to finish with an edition that can be sold (with the proceeds split between us). So it’s become more of a letterpress print residency, really.
So far I’ve had 4 ex-students, with two of those working with me as I write this, so I’m not totally sure what they are producing, but the experiments so far have been wonderful. I also keep aside ten copies of the edition for a future folio / exhibition pack. Each person also gets a letter outlining what they’ve achieved and the skills they’ve acquired, so that they can apply to use letterpress equipment elsewhere. I think it’s a pretty good deal.
If you’re interested in what we’re doing, buy a print, they’re all available at the Duckshop (to get there, hover your mouse up there on the web header, you’ll find a drop-down box that will take you to it) and very reasonably priced. Each print sale lifts the confidence of the resident who made it, and encourages me to keep doing this. Or if you’d like to be an EASS patron yourself, click that link at the top of this page and get involved. It’s a lot of fun and satisfaction.
List of recipients to date:
2010
Natalie Azzopardi
Peter McLean
2011
Helani Laisk
Jonathan Webster
In early November over 70 bookbinders from all over Australia came together for the first time in 27 years. The first conference was held in Canberra, and this one was too, thanks to the remarkable energy of Joy and John Tonkin along with a subcommittee of the Canberra Guild.
We weren’t all professional binders; I consider myself a complete amateur as far as fine binding goes, but I’m pretty good with alternative bindings. Some people were complete but very interested beginners, others were professional conservators or librarians or just plain interested. A lot of people *were* professional binders, and it was good to just sit behind my trade table in the breaks and listen to the conversations happening around me.
There was a woman from NZ in the ranks, and the rather fabulous Jim Canary came all the way from his Lilly Library in Indiana, US of A.
It was an action-packed weekend, but not as exhausting as something like Impact 7. The organisers ran a tight ship, dividing the mob into four sub-mobs so that we could all attend all of the demonstrations:
1. tool making with Jim Canary, who showed us that we don’t need fancy equipment to make finishing tools, and (most importantly), we don’t need fancy finishing tools to make amazing designs;
2. leather inlays and onlays,with German fine binder Barbara Schmelzer;
3. sewing headbands with Fabienne Nicolaj, who helped us through both the French and Dutch sewing techniques;
and 4. edge decorating with Joy Tonkin, who shows us lots of interesting ways to decorate a fore-edge, from graphite ‘gilding’ to paste combing. Here she is embossing into the graphite with a (cold) finishing tool.
My contribution to the event was also about fore-edge decoration, but while Joy was talking about decorating the surface, I was talking about hidden fore-edge paintings, like the contemporary ones done here and here. I’ve never done a fore-edge painting, but Donald Kerr (my host during my Dunedin residency) showed me a couple of beauties from his collection and Joy asked me to share my joy, so to speak.
I also had a trade table, selling my books in sheets for other binders to play with, and I was alongside all sorts of traders: Pepe, from Pepe’s Paperie, who is transforming his Phillip store into a serious supplier of binding materials; people selling leather, and paper, and type ornaments for gold tooling. I bought a stack of gorgeous Tibetan papers from Jim Canary, who has been going to Tibet annually to help their papermaking industry.
I learned so much over the weekend, about a whole lot of things: how to work with unbacked cloth instead of bookcloth, about the incredible collection over at the Lilly Library (including a huge miniature book section), about how medieval Irish monks worked in their scriptoriums, about titling in fine bindings, and there was lots of discussion about the need to keep teaching and training to keep bookbinding alive.
One thing that had me rivetted and then thinking hard was Rosemary Jeffers-Palmer’s report-back on the Society of Bookbinders Conference in the UK. They have an annual members’ exhibition, and while there are the usual categories: best fine binding, best alternate binding, etc, they now have a new category: THE COMPLETE BOOK. By this, they mean artists’ books. Complete, because every part of the book works together to make a whole; the binding and the contents cannot be separated. I fell in love with the thought of that description, the complete book. It’s such an inclusive phrase, and wonderful if you think that most traditional binders don’t have a lot of respect for artists’ books. This is a very good way to improve that relationship.
We had a bit of socialising too: there was a cocktail cruise on Lake Burley Griffin followed by dinner at the Yacht Club, and on the final night we had a BBQ at the house of a Canberra Guild member.
As part of the conference fee, the Tonkins are producing the proceedings of the conference as bindable sheets, so we’ll all have fun making our own personalised souvenirs of the weekend.
If you would like to see more photos from The Gathering (which isn’t a scary cult name, as some of my friends joked; it’s the term used for when you bring together all the signatures of a book to sew together), there’s some at my flickr page.
It all went so well that another guild felt brave enough to put themselves forward to host another gathering — in two years time, in Melbourne. We in Canberra are very hopeful that this will eventuate, because we know that there are many more binders out there, and Melbourne is such a booky city. Bring it on!
(A detail from Scott Lyon’s Fleurons exhibition at Postbox 141 in the city)
Melbourne didn’t really behave itself for Impact7; I know everyone makes jokes about the city having four seasons in one day, but to turn on its wettest Spring day in 100 years was just showing off, don’t you think? On the wednesday, while I was sitting at my folio table showing my wares and talking to people, the sky went pitch black and the inside lights started flickering as lightning and thunder raged outside.
Luckily the conference was mostly indoors (unlike the filming session of Winners and Losers attempting to work on the grass just outside the conference) so apart from a wild wet trip over to another Monash campus for an exhibition opening, we all stayed pretty snug.
Impact7 was a densely-packed intellectual experience. In fact, many complained that there was too much content, and indeed, with six parallel sessions at any one time that weren’t strictly aligned, it was very hard to mix and match the papers and try to catch a broad range of topics. There were many streams of subject matter, from traditional printmaking to digital media, from letterpress to artists’ books. The two hot topics seemed to be cross-media platforms and artists’ books. I can’t speak for the media sessions (merely that there were a lot of them), but every session on books was standing-room only.
Highlights of the conference for me were (in no particular order):
- All of Sarah Bodman’s showcasing of international artists’ books. She also brought a selection of books inspired by Ed Ruscha, and left them out for people to handle without gloves, which was fantastic. I like her relaxed approach to the book world.
(Sarah wore many hats during Impact, both as speaker for herself, for her collaborator Tom Sowden, and as a session convenor. Here she’s talking as herself & Tom about their Bookarts Manifesto project, which was a wonderful project because, unlike Drucker’s attempts to categorise everything, the BM acknowledged from the outset that it is impossible to define the genre, and then went on to explore just how crazy big it is. This is an image of some of the ways different artists positioned themselves within existing categories, adding more and rearranging the elements for themselves. I was excited to see my contribution to the project on the top left of the image!)
- Seeing all of our Book Art Object works in one spot, arranged by theme. Some of the books haven’t been distributed yet, so it was a treat to see the newer ones. There were four BAO members at Impact: myself, Sara Bowen, Rhonda Ayliffe and Amanda Watson-Will, and we spent some time together, out of which a new theme for the next edition has emerged, based on a work by Sarah Bodman. We all spent time blogging about the conference (27 posts in the week between us!) so head over there if you want to see some BAO perspectives (that link takes you to one of the Impact posts, rather than the general blog).
(None of my Impact photos are very good! Here’s Rhonda, standing by our wall of BAO books.)
- Paul Coldwell talking about Paula Rego and her Nursery Rhymes book (one of my bookshelf’s treasures, albeit as a Folio Society edition)
- David Ferry, whom I encountered in Korea years ago, giving an hilarious talk about Double Acts/Double Takes/Double Entendres that had us all chortling.
(Here Ferry is illuminating all the various characters in The Biscuit Nativity from Vis magazine.)
- Talking face-to-face with Book Arts high priestess Johanna Drucker at the end of her skype keynote talk, as I asked/made an observation about Fluxus being a dress rehearsal for the archive headaches that the internet is giving curators and librarians. Like many people also observed, her talk was a difficult and frustrating experience thanks to the vagaries of skype (low quality sound, drop-outs etc) but the moment that her face appeared, things just seemed better. A shame she hadn’t talked to us with occasional images, rather than attempted a powerpoint-like presentation.
- my session, not for the fact that I talked, but because the two other presenters were also discussing letterpress issues (despite our session title lumping us as ‘Globalization, national identities and the post-colonial perspective’) and at the end we managed to have a conversation between the three of us and the rest of the room, which was wonderful.
(An image from Jacqueline Naismith’s talk about her NZ design students, working with letterpress to explore visual notions of local food; this is ‘colonial goose’, which was a popular colonial dish of stuffed mutton flavoured to taste like goose!)
- Braving the storm and getting drenched in order to be at the launch of Monica Oppen’s exhibition and book The Silent Scream: Political and Social Comment in Books by Artists, an amazing array of books by an amazing array of artists (and I’m chuffed to be included in that array).
- ANU’s Art History Professor Sasha Grishin outing himself as a zine reader in the last day’s panel on zines, and then proceeding to talk about his habit in terms of a drug user. Wonderful! Followed by a mini zine fair where I stocked up on all the back editions of Plastic Knife, among other things.
- All the amazing exhibitions around the campus, of which I’m sure I didn’t see all, no matter how widely I wandered.
- Experiencing Ruth Bain, the conference manager, who seemed to have swallowed The Little Book of Calm. She was incredible.
There was so much to do, so many thoughts to think. It will take a while for my brain to process all this new information.
(These are some of the people who weren’t rushing around between sessions trying to see & do everything.)
I caught up with lots of people I haven’t seen for ages, some who I only get to talk to at conferences, and met a whole heap of new people. I keep hearing of people I missed, which isn’t hard because there was a transient conference population of 300-400 people. Woah!
(Ancora Press, with Brian McMullin showing his printing skillz in the background)
I also popped downstairs to Monash’s Ancora Press, which is probably the last surviving bibliographic press in Australia. A bibliographic press is one used to explore traditional textual issues, teaching English students about how books used to be make and the kinds of errors and subtleties that arise from hand-setting and printing. Ancora Press is now shared by the English department and the Art/Design department, which makes an interesting mix and also makes it hard to keep the type ‘nice’… traditional printing methods and graphic design/art methods are completely at odds with each other, a topic I find endlessly fascinating, having one foot in each camp.
(Nicci Haynes and Genevieve Swifte, my Canberra comrades. Genevieve is showing her portfolio.)
(Here’s my portfolio table, looking as colourful and attractive as I could make it with travel luggage limitations!)
(A dark photo of master printermaker John Loane)
John Loane (Veridian Press) talked about his longstanding and ongoing working relationship with Mike Parr as a keynote address. It’s rare to have John talking without Mike dominating the space, and this time Mike was overseas, so the audience had John all to themselves. The talk was fabulous, but it struck me most of the way through that if a woman presented a body of work this gendercentric, she’d be typecast as a radical separatist. The only female presence in what we were shown (over decades of work) were some breasts Parr had drawn on himself. I get to talk to John a lot because he’s living in Canberra these days, but he’s a humble man, and it was nice to see more of what he does and says.
(Here’s a pic of Rhonda Ayliffe on the left, Paul Uhlmann (WA) in the centre and Nicci Haynes on the right. There are other interesting people at the table but out of shot: Iona Walsh (Canberra designer/printmaker), Amanda Watson Will, Sara Bowen, Annie Trevillian (Canberra textile printmaker). We’re eating at a fab little Sri Lankan cafe around the corner from the conference.)
And finally, a bit of Melbourne texture. I had a great week, and look forward to seeing what emerges from all the ideas and connections. Congratulations to Marian Crawford and Ruth Bain for a STERLING effort!
I love the moment in a residency (says she, with the wisdom of only two residencies) when you realise that it’s ok, everything will be finished in time. Mind you, with both experiences that realisation came quite late in the piece, but maybe that’s normal.
When we finished printing, the time came for writing. I have to admit, getting the parents to send in addresses for the kids to use was a bit like herding cats, and to mimimise the stress we (the teachers and I in conference) made a commitment that if we hadn’t received a separate address, the child would just send their postcard to their family at home. Happily, there was a Learning Journey morning just at the right time (where the parents come in & accompany their children in a series of classroom tasks to see how much they’ve progressed in the year) and we got a heap of addresses that way.
These are the Pre-school postcards, scribed by the assistant, Tora, who had her last day at the school on the day we posted their cards.
Because the Pre-schoolers only attended Mondays to Thursdays, we posted their cards on the last Thursday of my residency, and the rest of the school on the Friday.
Here they all are, with Fiona the wonder-teacher, getting prepped to walk down to the post office.
…and here they are, arriving at the Post Office (faces blurred as requested). We took lots of photos of them posting the cards, but I’m yet to get them from Fiona, as I was too busy helping them up & down the step-ladder that Ken, the Post-Office-man, kindly provided to help them reach the slot.
The next day, the rest of the kids were really excited about getting to the post office.
(I can show you the faces of the Year 2 kids, because they all have media clearance. The others I have to pixellate if they’re recognisable.)
They are such delightful kids.
 
Walking to the shops.
Ken, the nice Post-Office-man, met us all and welcomed us to the post box. He had his trusty stepladder for the smaller kids…
… and then he gave us all date stamps on our hands! Winner!
It’s a short and lovely walk to and from the shops, especially this time of year when it’s warm and all the blossom is out.
At the end, back at school, we had a group photo, yelling POSTCARD!
And it was all over, bar drinks with the beautiful teachers down at the pub.
All I have left to do now is to make a souvenir book of a set of the postcards for the school. We got all the children to write a personal reflection about the project on the back of one of their cards and give it to me; I will use a single coptic binding and put them all together before next term, when I’ll pop in and deliver it.
What a great term’s work!
There’s a number of thank-yous I need to give.
Firstly, to ArtsACT, for selecting me and making this all possible.
Secondly, to some very special people who gave me advice and help: Amelia Zaraftis for submission aid and a glowing reference, Franki Sparke for printmaking magic, and the staff of the Art & Design Dept of CIT Reid for the use of their awesome guillotine.
Thirdly, to the amazing staff of the school, all of whom were supportive, friendly and generous. The headmistress, Margaret May, is a very special person. Also to the parents who offered and gave support.
And finally, to the children, who rocked my world. It was fantastic.
THANK YOU.
Pre-amble ramble
The other day I walked into the Principal’s office (where I’ve been stashing my bag of a day) and she asked me what I’d learned that day. What haven’t I learned! The school’s motto, Together we learn, together we grow, is a philosophy I really support, as any of my adult class participants would tell you. I often learn as much from my students as they learn from me.
When I was in NZ this time last year, my main learning outcome was ink handling, through weeks of hand-rolling my type for a flat-bed iron hand-press. This year I’ve learned to create simple but organised systems when working with children so that they can be as creative as possible and I don’t get lost along the way. Children are so mindblowingly full of creative energy that their educating adults have to spend most of their time working out ways to structure and contain that energy, whilst also trying to encourage it.
So: once we finished printing their names in letterpress, I spent time during the Book and Numlit weeks printing the backs of the postcards using photopolymer plate and my home press.
As you can see, we had two versions of the writing lines. The top is for Years 1 and 2, and the bottom version is for Kindy and Pre-school, as their writing is so much bigger. The rest is all the stuff that makes the funding go around, like logos and ownership of the project, etc. The focus of this project is PROCESS, but it doesn’t hurt to have a bit of solid result 
Then I put together the materials for our colour printing and brought them into the school. I set up an experimental table for the first day, just to see how the kids would respond to my concept.
At this point I’d like to give huge thanks to star printmaker Franki Sparke. Franki is a Canberra printmaker who never gets enough acknowledgement anywhere else. She flies below the radar, using print as an illustrator’s tool, blurring the lines between illustration and art. All of her printmaking is low-tech, using rubber stamps, linocuts and various other simple kitchen-table forms, and she does lots of community artmaking, especially encouraging women, kids and teenagers to express themselves through art. She and another great Canberra printmaker, John Pratt, used to have their studio in a primary school back in the 80s; they called themselves Studio Milk, and the kids were encouraged to come in at recess and lunch to participate in their work or just hang around. Can you imagine something so informal happening now?!! She makes work about running away: from oppression, from capitalism, from complacency, from stupidity. She makes affordable, democratic art in the form of prints and books, so do her a favour and go to her website.
Franki did a residency with this particular school years ago, and every time I walk past the mural that she made with the children, I think of her. Gratefully, because when I got this residency, I went to her studio at Gorman House (we used to be neighbours at ANCA) and picked her brains about interesting and non-toxic ways to print with children (since I’d already subjected them to oil-based letterpress ink, I thought I’d better make the next stage a bit healthier!). She showed me her latest experiments with plasticine, making shapes and printing them like stop-motion animation, moving them slightly between prints (they tend to shift in shape with hand pressure anyway), and she showed me how she makes her own stamp pads with gouache, because if they dry out, you can reactivate them with water.Thank you, Franki, you are a generous and wonderful person.
Printing
The kids loved my experimental table. I put four colours out: blue, green, orange and magenta. I was very careful to choose magenta, because it’s so close to purple that boys will use it happily (girls are happy to use all colours; boys are very pink-wary). This was at the start of recess, and I wanted to see what would happen.
Here’s Imogen again, she loves to pose for the camera. They had various objects to press into the colours, plus plasticine to mould & print and foam to cut into shapes (they could also draw on the foam to add to the image-making).
By the end of recess, the colours were getting contaminated with each other. The kids were getting frustrated about how tricky it was to make a really clear image from the foam and the plasticine (they were trying to make quite complicated pictures), and I was thinking that maybe this wasn’t going to work very well. Crisis!
They all went back into class. I cleaned up a bit and sat and thought hard for a while. I thought about what I was trying to do with this project. I thought about the things that had been stipulated in the brief when I applied for it. It was all about letting small children learn through experimentation and play, and these two things are the cornerstone of this school’s philosophy. Artmaking with children this age should be about process, not result, and so I needed to streamline the procedure, and allow interesting things to happen without major stress, and encourage the children to make marks rather than images.The final result was less important than the experience.
This seems very obvious in retrospect, seeing that we’d called the project Postmark to play upon the mark-making, but that morning I just needed to break it all down and get things straight in my head. I went into the office and asked Bek, the Deputy-Head, if I could use her as a sounding board, and told her what I just told you. She looked at me when I’d finished and said that I’d come further in a morning than many teachers come in years, and had I ever considered becoming a school teacher? Plan C, I said, but thanks! I felt better then.
OK. System time.
I found a wonderful semi-circle table that I could use, and set up some ‘colour stations’, where all the pieces that went with a colour stayed, so that the colours wouldn’t be contaminated. Each station had a roller, a few interesting things unique to the colour, and a mix of strings, foam bits, plasticine and cork stamps.
The colour pads are made of household sponges (I made sure to get ones that weren’t pre-soaked with soap) sitting in recycled takeaway or strawberry containers (the kind with no drainage holes) that I brushed a thick coating of gouache into with sprays of water. Every day I would add a bit more gouache from the tube, and through the day I would use the same colour-dedicated brush to ‘massage’ the sponge (the kids loved me saying that) to keep it moist and ‘inky’.
Here you can see the gouache, my brush container, the water-sprayer, and the containers.
This all worked a treat, and the kids really loved going to the different stations. There were two favorite printing ‘tools’: at the orange, I had a Duplo (Lego) traincart that had ribbed rubber tyres which printed fabulous tyre-tracks; at the blue, I had a weird bit of pine that my son had whittled into a shape which could be rocked in the ‘ink’ and then rocked on the paper to create wood-grain spirograph-type marks. I don’t think my son missed the piece from his messy room 
You can see the cart on the right, with a yellow tray.
And here in the foreground you can see the marks of the wood piece, which itself is just jutting into the left side of the photo.
The colours behaved themselves beautifully, and they all made gorgeous prints. I’d love to show you all of them, but that would take a lot of bandwidth!
I was reading a lovely blog the other day about visual arts teaching and found this:
We remember:
10% of what we HEAR
15% of what we READ
25% of what we HEAR & READ
40% of what we DO
60% of what we HEAR, READ & DO
85% of what we TEACH OTHERS
Absolutely. Next post: posting!
This is the second week of workshops I was asked to present as an addendum to the main postcard project.
I thought, since I’m taking the kids through a few outmoded printing techniques like
letterpress
and
typing on a manual typewriter (here’s Ruby, dressed in her costume for the Book Week parade)
that it would be lots of fun to let them play with ink and pen techniques. Again, I broke it down for each class level.
Preschool
(4 & 5 year-olds)
Fiona, the preschool teacher, already had plans to do some illuminated Medieval letters with the kids (colouring them in with gorgeous metallic pens & colours) so she & I worked out a plan where I’d get them to do pen & ink page borders into which they could stick their illuminated letters.
As you can see, we used bamboo pens. We also used water-based Indian ink, especially formulated for children, so that it can wash out
Fiona was really surprised how little mess the ink made; I mean, we made blobs and smears and they sometimes kept drawing off the page onto the newsprint underneath, but I think she’d expected them to splat and dribble it like paint.
But no… they were fascinated by the ink, by its glossy blackness, which is a black you just can’t get with pencil or texta or crayon. They treated it really respectfully, and it repaid them with lots of lovely different kinds of lines.
I showed them a Powerpoint of lots of decorated borders, many with floral themes, but others with animals and/or cherubs and more again with architectural elements. The kids got really inspired and did great work! I showed them how to make spiders out of ink blobs, which took the stress out of making the blobs, and some of their borders got quite cobwebby.
(They are working with the pens & ink again this week, using the ink to make cherry-blossom branches and then sticking on bits of scrunched-up pink paper to make the blossoms. It looks fabulous!)
Kindergarten
(5 & 6 year-olds)
For this group I used the bamboo pens again, but this time I pulled out a few books by my favorite illustrators like Quentin Blake and Edward Ardizzone and Wanda G’ag and showed the kids how they drew with interesting, quirky and scratchy lines.
I read them Wanda’s wonderful book Millions of Cats, which is a dark and multi-layered story that had the children completely enthralled, especially when nearly all of the cats ate each other. No-one seemed particularly traumatised (although one girl refused to believe it, she said ‘they all just ran away’), but I apologise if anyone lost sleep that night!
Afterwards they all had a go with the pens and ink, and again, like the preschoolers, were enthralled by the glossy black of the ink and drew amazing things.
Mostly involving hills and houses, but very few cats.
All of the pens and ink that I bought with the residency funding are staying with the school, and the Kindy teacher tells me that they all want to use them regularly, so pen & ink play will be part of their regular morning Investigation Stations play! I’m really happy about that.
Year One
(6 & 7 year-olds)
For this group and the Year Twos I bought some actual steel nibs and handles to use with the ink. With Year One I found some really cool calligraphy images; some were just textual embellishments like this:
Then we moved to some that incorporated living things:
And then I showed them some really cool Arabic zoomorphic calligraphy from Bibliodyssey. They loved that, especially the zebra and the tiger.
And then they sat down and didn’t draw anything like anything we’d looked at, but that was ok, because they’d taken onboard some appreciation of what these pens could do, and they totally got into the linework and the glossy black, etc.
 Actually, you can see here that Ruby A (not the red witch) tried to incorporate the letters of her name into the picture. I love the way she wrote ‘Ruby’.
This is Stephen. He’s labelling his drawing as he does it, and, typical of most of the kids, he is living through the drawing as he does it: it is animating as he draws. Quite often the finished drawing is just a reminder of the fabulous process they went through.
See? the little thing is humming, and Stephen was humming as he drew it. Drawing is a living, breathing thing for children.
Year Two
(7 & 8 year-olds)
The year twos seem so much older than the rest of the school. They do everything in a much more mature way; it’s incredible the difference a year makes.
For this mob I pulled out a book I adore from my collection; I found it in a secondhand bookshop for $10, and it’s amazing. Long, fold-out reproductions of engravings of Austrian towns, very much like this one and this one. We talked about drawing maps, about how most maps are birds-eye but also mostly symbols, whereas these were drawn from a mountain-top perspective instead, and this is because that was the highest people could go without using their imaginations… there were no hot air balloons, or airplanes or satellites.
I gave them long strips of paper (every class was using good toothy 230gsm Como drawing paper, not bond paper, although if they finished and wanted to keep drawing, they used bond) and told them to try drawing either a place they knew or a place from their imagination using this mountain-top perspective.
These two lads usually jump around a bit, but the pen & ink had them glued to their chairs. They were the last to finish, and we almost had to pry the pens out of their hands!
We encouraged them to label the parts of their maps, and to include keys, if they could.
Again, the animated drawing process in action. Sam was making things explode; as he drew them, he would narrate, and as they exploded, he would use his left finger to smudge the ink to create a smoky aftermath.
They asked me to make a sign for them to help explain what they’d been doing so that they could pin their work up as a showcase. I’m not much of a calligrapher, but I thought I did ok:
It was a wonderful week, and the best part is knowing that I’ve sparked something that will continue in each class.
Now we’re going to have a printmaking adventure!
*Well, actually National Literacy and Numeracy Week, but that’s a bit of a mouthful for a post heading; I just called it Litnum week.
I’ve finished the first stage of the Postmark Mail Art project; every child and teacher in the school has set their names in type and printed them on their postcards. Now I have to print the backs of the cards with the formal postcard bits and the relevant official school and government logos (I’m using photopolymer plate for this) and then we can do the fun colour printing by hand with all sorts of things like foam and plasticine and found objects.
Last week (22-26 August) was National Book Week, and I was asked, as part of the residency, to hold book workshops for each class. I was also asked to dress up for the book parade as my favorite book character! So here I am, dressed as Professor Snape, alongside the school’s own art teacher, Julie, who was an excellent Sybil Trelawney. My beaker contains potion of fizzy drink with blue food colouring, which I told the children was made of ‘slugs, snails and snot, plus one blue jellybean’. None of them wanted to try it.
I wanted to introduce the idea that books could be different shapes, and could work in different ways, so I decided to show the children examples of artists’ books and teach each class a different structure. I bought a stack of gorgeous coloured paper, and with the help of my local TAFE (Canberra Institute of Technology, CIT) who kindly allowed me to use their industrial guillotine (bless you, CIT), I chopped the stack into various shapes and sizes to help the class run smoothly.
Preschool
With these children, all aged 4 or 5, I kept things simple, and we made what I call ‘Secret Pocket’ books, using the ‘Pants’ fold and cut technique that I use when I show people how to make concertina books or zines. I don’t know what the ‘normal’ title for it is.
You can see here how we folded the paper into eight parts: fold lengthwise in half, then fold the width in half and then each side in half again. Then I made a dot on the third fold, and the children cut with scissors up the long fold to the dot (then the paper looks like a pair of trousers, which is why I call it the ‘pants’ fold. I make them walk for the children before we fold it). We then folded the sections back and forth and around the corner to make a concertina book, and sticky-taped up the corner fold to make a pocket. I’d shown them one I’d made earlier, with pictures of vegetables I like on the pages, and a picture of a vegetable I didn’t like stuck in the pocket, like a secret. They loved the story, and when they started drawing, they came up with all sorts of ideas.
Kindergarten
I decided to up the ante and get the 5-6 year olds doing some origami folding to make simple but fabulous books using the waterbomb-base technique. It was a bit like herding cats for a while, because the last bit of the folding can be a bit tricky, but we had a great time (and some help from Adam, one of the parents — thanks!) and everyone came out the other side with something that they loved.
Year One
Year One and Year Two both made flag books, but I kept the Y1 (6-7 year old) version simpler with only two rows of panels. Again, it was like herding cats for a while as we folded the centre concertina, trying to keep the outside covers unfolded, but once they got drawing and sticking a lot of fun was had. They did some wonderful narrative work, often making each panel into something akin to an animation still. I tried to encourage every class to use coloured pencils rather than textas, as textas tended to just soak darkly into the paper, but the pencil pigments sat on top of the coloured paper, and kept their vibrancy, also working in collaboration with the background colour.
This is the outside of Ruby’s ‘Twirly Whirly Picture Book’.
And this is the inside!
Afterwards they all sat in a circle and read their books to the class, one by one.
Year Two
When I told the Year Twos (7-8 years old) that they were doing a trickier version of what Year One did, they puffed themselves up and showed themselves totally deserving of my expectation.
The best bit of the class was having time at the end to show them lots of my book samples and to be able to really have a close look at the catalogues I’d brought along.
(Year Two have media clearance, so I can show you photos that show their faces properly… of which Imogen is taking full advantage!)
They were particularly taken with my flip books. One is a commercial book I’d picked up from the National Film & Sound Archive, of the moment in North by Northwest when Cary Grant is swooped by the plane; the other is one I’d made myself, of my head bouncing up & down like a rubber ball.
In fact, Year Two liked me so much that they’ve asked me to come back for another session, to make a tunnel book with them, another form they were very taken with when I showed them an example!
So I think Book Week was a success, and expanded every child’s notion of what a book is. I also have a renewed admiration for the teachers at the school and all their hard work and energy. I will be wholeheartedly supporting their industrial action later this coming week, as ACT teachers are among the lowest paid in the country. Also, this week is National Literacy and Numeracy Week, so I’m doing pen & ink sessions with them all, using bamboo pens with the littlies and real handles & nibs for the older kids. Fun!
I’m spending this school term (end of July to end of September) working one day at the ANU School of Art teaching typography and a bit of binding, and the rest of the week as Artist-in-Residence at a local early learning school in the inner suburbs of Canberra, the O’Connor Cooperative School.
There are only five of these residencies granted every year, and I applied for it on a whim, because I’d decided that I liked the energy of small children, and wanted to interact with them a bit more. The fact that I was matched up with this particular school was very exciting. For one thing, there’s only 80 children in the whole school! It’s tiny, friendly, and extremely open-minded and progressive. They have solar-passive buildings, they keep chooks, and they recycle and reuse as an everyday activity. The school is on my ‘flight-path’, which means that I get to ride my bike there (when I’m not lugging materials and heavy equipment around), and the staff are amazing, generous and fun.
Unlike other years, when artists had to apply with a fully-formed idea, this time we were encouraged only to talk about our general practice and what we thought about making art with early learners, and then the final project would be fully negotiated between the artist and the school. Obviously I did ok with my pitch, and I have to mention here the help I got from my wonderful friend Amelia, who works professionally with art and children. Then I sat down with the OCS headmistress, Margaret, and her sidekick, Bec, and we nutted out a really fun project called POSTMARK MAIL ART. I always write it in caps, because it just needs to be shouted to the roof.
Here is nearly the whole school population (bar the preschoolers), ready to go for their weekly run up the park behind their schoolyard (they’re in training for the Canberra Fun Run, but they don’t know it yet). I’d just been to their assembly, where I’d talked to them about sending postcards and other things through the mail. Ready, set, GO!
Originally I’d wanted to print the backs of the postcards with a commercially-produced polymer plate (which included all the logos etc that needed to be included) and then the kids would make their own solar plates & print the fronts; this was all well & good until I did some test plates and discovered that the solar plates just didn’t work well with water-based inks, and I didn’t want them wallowing in oil-based ink.
So. I had a frenzied rethink, and went back to an earlier notion of combining letterpress and other, simpler techniques, and I’m glad I have now, because it’s allowing a lot more play and experimentation. I’m still doing the backs with a plate, but the rest is much more tactile.
This week we started printing. I took in my tabletop Adana platen press and a tray of type (48p Gill) and a pre-set chase ready to slot in their names. I set up my ‘printshop’ outside under cover in the playground (because we are using oil-based ink for this phase and it smells), and each child comes to me and sets their name themselves, then I put the chase in the press and I help them work the lever to print the cards.
They are printing an edition of four cards each: one for posting, one for keeping, and one for the school to keep. The fourth one is a spare one, to practice and allow for mistakes. The school copies will be bound together using a single coptic binding into a souvenir of the experience. I’ll get the kids to write a sentence on those ones on what they liked about the process.
Here’s some progress shots:
This is me in my printer’s hat. Every day I make a new one out of newspaper, and I wear it in the printshop, and the most enthusiastic child (or the one who remembers to ask at the end of the day) gets to take it home to keep. I look a bit sombre, but that’s because I’d given my camera to one of the children to shoot me, and I had no control over when he took the shot. I hadn’t smiled yet! The hat isn’t an affectation; it’s a very practical and cheap way of keeping stray bits of hair off your face and out of the ink. I haven’t perfected the size yet; the pattern allows you to adjust the size to fir anyone, and that day’s hat was a bit high, they’re meant to sit about halfway along your forehead (if you click on that printer’s hat link, you’ll see what I mean).
Here’s Ruby, selecting her name from my typecase. The kids love this bit, and are quite intrigued by the backwardness of it all.
And then she puts her name into the allotted spot in the chase, and I put it into the press.
And here’s Oscar, having just printed his second postcard. I set it up with the name in one corner, and a few stars in the diagonally opposite corner to balance the pressure. What child doesn’t like stars? They will fill the rest of the space with more basic printmaking later in the term.
So that’s where I’m up to; I’ve printed with about a third of the children to date, and because it work with them one on one, I get some marvellous conversations about type, printing, names, hats, pets, Christmas carols, and whatever else pops into their heads.
And the energy! I so admire those teachers; I’m already exhausted!
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