Wednesday, 2 August 2017

The Key

I have been attending a ceramics workshop at Signal Arts Centre on Thursday afternoons for a few months now. Prior to this, I had not worked in clay for nearly 30 years! How did it get away from me? I love working with clay and find it incredibly therapeutic. I wanted to test the possibility of making ceramic book covers for some of my handmade books. I thought of a simple "stick" book, and realised since the front cover could not bend, I would have to make a front half cover for the book binding. The back cover is about 9 cm square - it was only slightly larger before firing. I used a rubber stamp to add my name to the back cover after I rolled out a bit of lace to put texture on the book covers.


I had the idea for a book of images of a key and prepared pages from handmade Khadi paper, an Indian 100% cotton rag paper.



I did some test rubbings of two different house keys and preferred the one from my childhood home in Toronto.


Page one is a rubbing using black wax.


Page two was made using a Chinese ink wash and a Stabilo superfine pen.



 Page three was created by making a rubbing with graphite and erasing areas with a kneadable eraser.


 Page four is a watercolour pencil drawing.


Page five is a copper wax rubbing.


 Page six is a 3B pencil drawing.


Page seven is a watercolour pencil drawing of the negative space around the key.


Page eight, the final page, is an embossing of the key.


I will detail the final book in the next post.

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