More selected poems and images.

The work ploughs on, with some major tweaks in the overall content and layout which I shall hopefully be able to go in to more detail about later. In order to keep things moving here, here's a selection of some of the more recent poems and images from the book.

Judging a Book: The cover

Yesterday, I sent an incomplete version of Vectis off to lulu.com for a test printing. Particularly, I am interested in seeing if the bleeds work and all text remains readable at paper sizes. This marks an important point for Vectis; all the structure of the book is now in place, waiting only to be filled with joyous words and images. Much is already filled. All the photography for Summer and Autumn is done, and Autumn is about three quarters finished in every sense. But until this weekend, one task remained completely untackled.

In order to have the book printed, you see, it needs a cover.

Covers are an interesting element of book design. Many producers of artists books treat the cover as a completely integral part of the whole work, continuing themes from the inside to the outside. For me, however, the cover has a slightly different feel. The way I see it is as a frame; the frame is important to a work of art, and the frame should be appropriate (no elaborate gold-leafed rococo on the Kandinsky, please!), but it is not part of the work. It is slightly seperate from it. You can change the cover and still have the same book, in the way I see it anyway. 

Completed spreads

It's time to give a peek inside the book. I'm very close to being in a position where I can send a version off for test printing, and I've taken a few screenshots of some two page spreads, with a couple to show recent changes.

Big Sky, Lorry Depot

A couple of new images. I've been a bit sparse with these lately but I don't want to post up everything I'm doing. Here's a couple of recent ones.

This one might need to be muted a bit. One of the biggest tweaks I've made recently to the structure is the idea of, rather than concentrating entirely on portrait format images, I've been looking at including more landscape format images, which will be stretched across two pages in the book. In the Summer walks, there will only be one landscape image per walk, which will occupy the centre two pages (each walk, apart from the title page and map, takes up 28 pages), and will signal a switchover, from the image being on the right side of a spread to the left side of a spread. This will help give the book a little more rhythm, I hope. In the Autumn walks (which are starting finally to come together), landscape images will be interespersed with the portrait ones in a more fluid rhythmic pattern. The decision on how to bring all this in to the Winter section is still pending.

Portaits

Not much concrete to report, slow and frustrating progress over the last week or so. For the moment, here's some portraits of four famous people associated with the Isle of Wight in the 18th and 19th century, a possible illustration for the section on Isle of Wight history that is rapidly nearing completion. Not 100% sure about the style (Perhaps I should make it more graphic?*) or some of the decisions.

 Clockwise from top left: Karl Marx, Julia Margaret Cameron, Queen Victoria and John Keats. Together, these figures tie the island into many of the most important political and artistic developments of the last 200 years. Marx visited the Island for health reasons three times in the last decade of his life; though he had already written the books that would make him immortal. Julia Margaret Cameron kept her studio here, and helped advance the art of photography which has so transformed the world. From Osbourne House, Queen Victoria entertained her dynasty; a friend of mine has an anecdote from his grandfather of seeing Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II walking together during Cowes Week sometime in the 1900's. The war between their empires would eventually lay waste the whole world, birthing both World Wars. And it was whilst staying at Carisbrooke, gazing upon the castle ruins, that Keats wrote "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"

*EDIT: Something like this perhaps?

Worth a Hundred Pictures?

In the 'Autumn' section of Vectis words will be entwined (more on this to come) with the images I've gathered. I have come to decide that the text in the second section should be in the form of poetry that returns to and explores in other ways the themes developed throughout the other written sections of the book. I am writing the poems as a cycle, jotting down various phrases and images, trying to assemble something. Here is a first taster:

Under This Bridge

The world is browning

Where once it was blue and green

Soon it will be time for sacrifices

To recall the sun to the earth

But the memory of its warmth

Lingers still

And yes, it was under this bridge I sat

Sun to my face, Circle a to my back

And smoked in another life

Reading the signs in the ground

Knowing I was not the first

And sure I would not be the last

Is that not where happiness aims?

Is that not faith?

Not to be the first or last

No glory or tragedy

But quiet persistence

Cyclic law, and the mystery of the word

Maps for the first section

Are finally finished, and only a day late too! Unfortunately, Bayimg appears to be going through one of it's temporary blips, so I'll have to use up some of my precious Blogger storage space. Images after the cut.

Digital image making in the field

I recieved a significant equipment upgrade recently, and now have a laptop that will actually run photoshop. This has allowed me to do something I've wanted to try for a while; take my graphics tablet away from my desk and actually sketch some scenes from like. I was out on the first walk today, taking supplementary photographs, and I took the laptop along as well and made a couple of images, more as an experiment than anything else (the photographic basis of the majority of the images in Vectis is fairly locked down). The results of my first little foray are below.

Blog illustration

A little aside now on that picture from the Romanticism post below. I took the rather unusual step of making an illustration to fit a blog post. I was in a rut with other things creatively at the time, and that seemed to be what I needed to do; it won't happen too often (any further ballooning of the huge amount of work I still have to do for this project is to be definitely avoided). Actually, I made three different possible illustrations, all along a similiar theme. The one I chose was a bit of an experiment that I might take further at some point in the future. It is not, as it might first appear, either a doctored photograph or a hyperrealistic drawing, but a combination of digital painting and digital collage; it's actually made from about ten different photographs of trees and wooded areas, mixed together and overpainted. I came at the idea whilst trying to assemble a reference image to draw from, and I think it's quite effective. A more rigorous approach, carefully cutting out sections of trees and limbs and foliage and layering them up, might be something to try another time. Below the jump are the other two, unselected, Romanticism pictures; a treated photograph with some text and a straight up fantasy woodland nightscape digital painting, which was great fun to do but doesn't have that much relevance to the issue at hand, although it might be interesting in light of the next post.

An image from the first walk, Autumn

Today's been one of those days that frustate you when you're engaged on a creative endeavour, when nothing seems to click and everything is a frustrating dead end. I was hoping to have a new blog post on Romanticism and some more solid progress on the book itself, but alas, nothing has really come together. Unfortunately, I'm going to be away all weekend, starting tomorrow afternoon, so this will probably be the last opportunity for a blog post for a few days. With that in mind, here are a couple of images to be going away with, after the jump.

A map and a picture

Not much to show, still putting together the page by page plan of the contents. I realised I would need a good map of the island, almost before anything else, so I put this together, which took a lot longer than I expected:

Some experimental images.

Working towards a style for the images in the summer section, particularly. I've used a variety of scanned images of hand-made textures, scanned in to the computer, combined with heavily manipulated photographs and over-drawing. Images after the jump.