LAW 109: Pollacking and ABCdariums

NorthWind ABCdarium is my newest daily book/journal project. My husband and i 'pollacked' a 22 x 30" piece of unknown watercolor paper. 'Pollacking', a term my gallery mates came up with in reference to the paint style we used on the industrial grade, incredibly ugly grey carpet installed in our gallery when we rented it. We were afraid to see what was underneath it. Yes, it was a lot of fun splashing paint on the floor, yes, we got quite a bit on ourselves as well. You can really develop beautiful color and layering with spatter painting. This project is the NorthWind ABCdarium because we took the paper and premixed paint out to the end of our dock as there was no room in my studio for fun and games like this, it was a beautiful bright sunny and windy day. I can see the strong influence of the north wind in the paint patterns.

Action painting on the dock!

To create the body of the book i folded the paper first in half, then in quarters lengthwise; creating strips 30 x 51/2" long. Two of the strips were than folded into eight panel accordions, which were than overlapped and glued in the middle. This construction gave me a two sided, 28 panel accordion book plus cover flaps. Plenty of room for an alphabet book.

Not a bad studio space, hey?

The individual panels are 5 1/2 x 3 3/4", the background a very thinned liquid craft acrylic paint which was purchased for another project and languishing in dark hole storage in my studio. Since this is another variation of zen doodling i made the decision that an important 'constant' would be the size and shape of the letters. I've used the idea of the circle/mandala for the last two books, it felt right to branch out into other shapes. I toyed with the idea of using a commercial stencil, but rejected all the ones i have to hand as too mechanical as well as too small. So i sat down and started designing my own font.

I had to fold the paper on my studio floor!

A very side note to font design: as a teenager, quite some time ago i was a cheerleader. Needless to say, back in the Stone Age we had no cool tools to help us create our spirit signs. I became my squad's de facto font designer/sign writer. Then as now i utilized the whole design process, hated by all design students, thumbnails, rough sketches and drafts to final project. Since i was overlaying the letter onto a painted surface i really, really did not want to sketch onto that surface. Rather i wanted a smooth one line mark. So, in essence i have created my own font, and turned them into stencils. 

Progress with stencils

The process of the ink drawing feels far more decorative than the circle books. Part of the process has to be grounded in the recognition of each letter. With the circles i was much freer to simply go where the line took me. Both practices have positive and negative elements. Even though i have only finished four letters so far i feel a definite lack of spontaneity.

So, i think that the separate letter panels are all pretty self explanatory, right? If not, i guess it might just be time to go back to grade school. I'll post more of these every few days, along with progress shots.

More later,

Morgainne, aka Gail