I made a roll-up kit bag for when painting outside.
And a bag for my digital drawing tablet, from the same material.
They’re both made of the same material (a durable shopping bag), except the digital tablet bag is padded with a thick black felt lining.
See the entire post below for more pictures.
I need to get a job.
Check out more images of this Father Time doll and how I made it, by viewing the full entry below. I’m particularly proud of the solution I found for his skull.
A close-up of my colourful and fibrous veggie paper.
The inner edge of the apple card is dark because I had to moisten it
in order to fold it without breaking the paper.
Paper doesn’t have to be made out of wood fibres, and it doesn’t have to be bleached and smooth. I had fun making this fruit and vegetable fibre based paper (admittedly it’s quite coarse — like card) and printing on it with fruit and vegetables afterwards. I should have gone the full mile and made the paint out of fruits and vegetables, too!
For more photographs and an explanation of the process, read the full post.
I decided to make my own life mask (above) after recently becoming intrigued by the concept of death masks. Wikipedia:
In Western cultures a death mask is a wax or plaster cast made of a person’s face following death. Death masks may be mementos of the dead, or be used for creation of portraits. It is sometimes possible to identify portraits that have been painted from death masks, because of the characteristic slight distortions of the features caused by the weight of the plaster during the making of the mold. In other cultures a death mask may be a clay or other artifact placed on the face of the deceased before burial rites. The best known of these are the masks used by ancient Egyptians as part of the mummification process, such as Tutankhamon’s burial mask.
In the seventeenth century in some European countries, it was common for death masks to be used as part of the effigy of the deceased, displayed at state funerals. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they were also used to permanently record the features of unknown corpses for purposes of identification. This function was later replaced by photography.
Shorpy has this grisly image of a death mask being made in New York circa 1908.
Wikipedia has photos of some interesting masks including a life mask of Abraham Lincoln and a death mask of Blaise Pascal.
When looking for instructions on how to proceed with making my mask, I found these two articles handy (I followed the second one in the event):
Check out the extended post below for more photographs of my attempt to make a life mask.
My paperback copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was in need of some love; its spine was broken, the pages were falling out, and the cover was pretty ugly to begin with (I can’t even track down the cover online, which suggests it’s a design that didn’t last long).
So I knocked out a new jacket, complete with buttons. I rebound the book with woodglue along the spine.
The colourful felt used is actually cut from a metre-length of kitchen cloth that I got at the supermarket.
The text is printed directly on to the felt. I fed an A4 piece of the felt through my (standard) printer. The text resolution was surprisingly crisp and attractive.
I wanted a blank a5 book to make notes in, but I actually couldn’t find one on sale anywhere around here. So I made one.
I cut a pad of a4 drawing paper in two, put all the paper together and glued the spine with wood glue, to keep all the pages together.
Then made a cover, drilled holes all the way down the side, and bound everything together with the japanese binding technique I learnt in my papermaking class.
The cover is made from a map of Tuebingen, the place in Germany where I was living for the past five months or so.
The binding string is a sort of plastic rafia that I found in my parents’ garage. It’s durable and looks pretty neat. Nice colour.
The cover is made from two discarded women’s boots that I found in the basement of my apartment building.
The buckle was also part of the boots, but now serves as a clasp to close the book.
The stitching (all the stitching that is not left over from the original pattern of the boots) is all hand-stitched and rough.
Given the nature of the material used, and its source, the faux leather had to be cut into shapes and then stuck together to make a large enough surface area. This lends the book a frankenstein’s monster sort of look…
Continue reading below for lots more pictures and background info.
