What's New in the Studio - Other Stuff

        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!]

        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.]