I’m super busy right now with two big projects that are neither block printing nor juvenile fantasy, alas, but I’ll share them because I don’t have the energy to switch gears. Most urgent is a set of banners that we hope will be approved to hang in the center of town for Needham Open Studios. This is a frantic scramble to get designs (and money!) put together in time to submit on Monday. Here’s the design idea I really liked, showing the process and the finished art. We won’t be using this design concept because we decided it was too complicated to show up well, but I thought I’d share it here, at least. [Actually, in the end we did use something very like this for half the banners.]
The second project is more interesting. It’s illustrations for a book about children’s Quaker meeting for business. At first I was thinking of using block printing, but I couldn’t make that idea work, so now I’m working with a collage/mixed media/digital approach inspired in part by Ezra Jack Keats.
There are some interesting challenges in this project, from the mundane - how to make the pictures interesting and different when they’re essentially all just children sitting around a table together, to the spiritual - how to show visually that there really can be a divine spirit at work among gathered children. Here’s a first two page spread for that project. (No divine spirit in evidence yet, but I have a plan I’m experimenting with…) [Post about the launch of the finished book here!]
There are some interesting challenges in this project, from the mundane - how to make the pictures interesting and different when they’re essentially all just children sitting around a table together, to the spiritual - how to show visually that there really can be a divine spirit at work among gathered children. Here’s a first two page spread for that project. (No divine spirit in evidence yet, but I have a plan I’m experimenting with…) [Post about the launch of the finished book here!]
And the final thing that’s new in the studio? My keyboard’s space bar isn’t working. Like trying to do math without the zero, writing gets much more frustrating without spaces!
[Pictures: Mock-up of a banner for Needham Open Studios, AEGN, 2016;
Draft of an illustration, collage and digital manipulation by AEGN for Approved! by Nancy Haines, 2016.]
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