Signal studio - full swing!

Well I'm in my last week of the residency here at Signal Arts Centre, and it has been very productive! The time has gone by very quickly, but a ten week residency provides a perfect limitation - definite time to work on a few specific projects but the limitation does not allow for dawdling. My schedule was a basic 10-5 workday from Monday to Wednesday. Thursdays were a shortened day (including a shortened lunch), and Fridays were always a half day for me. When I first moved in to the studio at the end of September, I did a post that gave an indication of how I was going to work, setting up "stations" for my specific activities. During the residency I planned to concentrate on bookbinding and printmaking, with a daily self-portrait warm-up. For the month of October I added to this as I took part in Inktober, which I blogged about here.

This is the door to the studio, and each morning, after hanging my coat up on a nail, I made my way

to the self-portrait station. The full-length mirror was in the studio when I got there and was handier than the mini-mirror I had brought with me. I had a chair that faced the mirror and would choose what media I would use any day. The moveable computer table was also handy for access and to spread materials out on.

The large table behind the self-portrait station provided a miscellaneous work area. Visible on the foreground table in the photo below are books ready to be bound, one of my sketchbooks, and a cookie tin full of pencils, markers, charcoal, etc. There are two sinks in this studio, and when I arrived someone had placed a board over the second sink. I decided to leave the board and make use of the flat surface for finished books, which are visibly piled on top of each other.

The table in the lefthand corner of the room became a clean are for storing paper, research pictures, and drawings. Later even these things were removed so that there was a clean, flat surface to place finished prints. I taped test prints and drawings to the walls.

I borrowed a portable press from one of my nieces and gave it a clean table to itself. To the right of the picture is the working sink, and the area behind and to the left of the press table is the area where I would ink plates. Directly to the left of the press you can see the "window" I cut from heavy cardboard. The linoleum plates fit into this window, which I later affixed to the press plate, so that block printing would be smooth.

I forgot to take a picture of the other table, against the left wall and beside the clean, paper table above. This specific table was mostly clean, but the one that I worked at most constantly: transferring images to lino plates, cutting the lino, cutting leather and binding books. My final piece from the studio will be a series of linoprints, "A Short Walk to Fort Carré", bound together as a portfolio in an edition of three. I won't be binding the prints together till after I photograph them individually, but I have the portfolio covers cut and the final prints done, so I will be doing a post about them in the new year.