Tag: Salute the Pig

Countdown to P-Day

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It’s only a few days now before the Autumn Country Market At Easton this Sunday, where we will be showing our completed “Salute the Pig” book.
I have spent the last few months getting just 10 of the 25 books bound, prints made, some accompanying ceramics prepared and all the bits of faffing around that go along with having a stall.
It has been very, very time consuming.. But we will be ready for Sunday!!!

The Books:
I am not a bookbinder as such, so the most nerve racking aspect of all this has been trying to bind the main letterpress printed books.  There are only so many beautifully printed sheets to work with, and I cannot afford to make any serious mistakes.

Covers and endpapers were handprinted. Books sewn and glued then all assembled and the original lino print plates tipped in and stamped. Phew..It’s adhering the endpapers to the covers that I have found most difficult… but it is good to try and get things right. All I can say is, I have made them the very best I can at this stage of my bookbinding ability!

Chris’s accompanying recipe booklet was digitally printed and so we designed it in InDesign echoing the type style of the main book. I converted my piggy sketches to monchrome red and dropped them into the text. The books are finished with a binding of … what else but… stripy butcher’s string!



The Well Fed Pig:
We are selling a few prints from the book seperately and I worked on a large two colour combined lino/woodcut of the Well Fed Pig. I had already explored this theme of the pig tattooed with its favourite food in some earlier experimental ceramics and it has developed nicely into the print. The original image is A3 and I am selling these, plus a smaller digital A3 version.

Three Little Pigs 

I liked some of the sketches from the recipe book so much that I decided to have some cards printed of the piglets. More may follow!


The Ceramics

I like to make ceramics occasionally but I could never say I am a ceramicist. However over the last year I have played with some ideas which I thought might work for the pigs.  My ceramics are a bit like my bookbinding.. rather experimental, so sometimes ideas worked, but very often not, due to my own inexperience and/or firing issues, which rather dampened my initial enthusiasm.
But eventually I have enough good ones to be able to add them to the Pig Box and offer a small number for sale….and for me to consider continuing….many thanks to Gay and Julie for dragging me out of the slough of despond!

 

I am making a page on the blog about this project… I wonder if it will ever be finished 🙂

Pig Progress and Florence 2

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PIG PROGRESS:
There is so much going on right now, but in between the prints and drawings and learning a bit more bookbinding, I am working on the pigs. More 3D ceramics ones this time. I had experimented with some 3D shapes over a year ago and have been wondering how to decorate them. On my recent trips to the Fitzwilliam Museum I had looked at the wonderful old English decorated and sprigged saltware, which at last sparked some ideas.
My skills don’t quite run to sprigging yet, so my first pigs ( of what will hopefully be a series, called “The Well-Fed Pigs”) are just black and white scraffito. I thought it would be rather nice to pattern them with all their favourite foods, “well fed”, in both quality and volume. More, many more perhaps, to come!

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Sketches and notes for “The Well Fed Pigs” and a couple of trial pieces. I like them!

FLORENCE 2:
This autumn I decided to try to bring more ideas and experiments to some sort of resolution. I find it impossible to say “finished” but at least something other than files and folders of random sheets.So I made a small folder (good bookbinding practise) for the Florence prints and mounted them on folded sheets. It is a much nicer way of storing these colour woodcut experiments and they looked  much improved for a bit of care and attention

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Binding the Pigs!

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I am really busy right now with a new small book project,  but also making some, albeit a bit slow, progress with the “Salute the Pig” books.
I have “assembled” one trial binding. I say “assembled” because it’s definitely trial and error and there are still some things to get right in the stitching and spine areas. But it is coming along. I printed the endpapers and cover designs some time ago:

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Trotting trotters for the endpapers…

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Two halves of one very big pig for the cover….

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End papers pasted in….

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Cover assembled…

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One book bound :)… only another 24 to go…AND…. Chris is working hard on the accompanying little recipe book. “A Feast of Pork”…

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All tried and tested here at home ….MMMMMMMM delicious !

Half the Hog in Amsterdam: Part 1

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Last week we were in Amsterdam to print the Pig Book, “Salute the Pig”. Its been a couple of years in the thinking stage, so it was very nice to see it at last become an almost reality.

I say almost because I now have to design end papers and cover and then bind them, but they are looking splendid. We had booked a week with the excellent  Thomas Gravemaker at LetterpressAmsterdam. 5 days is a very short time to print even this small book and if Thomas had not done the typesetting we probably wouldn’t have made it.

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4 of the texts tied up on the galley.

While Thomas was finishing the texts, I started printing the images from the mounted lino blocks. A little bit of extra shim was needed to get the block to just type high but they printed pretty well!

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The Berkshire block locked up on the bed of the Vandercook

Proofing each block is important because a letterpress press can pick up the odd raised cut mark so a little bit of remedial cutting was made on some of the blocks, Due to the large amount of black in these prints it was necessary to double ink each image.Which means running the inking rollers over the blocks once prior to the print run. After printing the tree book pages for 5 weeks my right arm must be getting stronger?

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The first rack of images..I am printing 30 of each for a book edition of 25 books. These plates will be trimmed by hand and then tipped in to the bound book.

Thomas finished the texts, then there was proofing and checking the texts again and again for spelling mistakes, spacings and incorrect letters. You think it is all OK and then you find another!

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Texts ready for proofreading.

By the end of Tuesday all the 300 plus plates were printed and we started on the book pages. We printed page 1 and page 24 first because these contain two small linocuts which will need to be dry before printing on the reverse.
Proofing the blocks,and printing the edition.

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Wednesday we started printing the texts!
Part Two tomorrow.

Tree Book Break and Pigs in Amsterdam

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I printed the last text page of 12 Trees yesterday. Phew.. it was very tricky and time consuming, but all the text is now done!
I “just” have the 12 main images to print now but they will have to wait until I am back from Amsterdam where I am printing Chris’ “Salute the Pig” book with Thomas Gravemaker at Letterpress Amsterdam again.
I printed my Masters project, Hortus Medicus Seedbook with Thomas and so I know the results will be great.

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Proofs for the pig book

The book is a tribute to 10 favourite pig breeds with lino cuts and a short text by Chris. He is also preparing an accompanying recipe book, one dish per pig with a bit of extra info about these lovely animals.

I have cut the blocks and proofed them, made up a three section dummy for the pagination and a quick InDesign document as a guide to margins etc. However, letterpress printing, as I have learnt, in the last few weeks has certain constraints and so one has to be flexible about the design especially when hand setting the type.

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Part of the 3 section dummy pasted up with text and images.

As with the !2 Trees book we are just printing the body of the book. endpapers and binding will be done later.It will be a small edition of just 20 .. which I think is about all we can print in 5 days! It’s all so very different from pressing the print button on the computer.. and to be honest much more fun.
More from Amsterdam soon.I am also posting on Instagram now if you want to see some more snaps of pigs and trees and lovely type.You can find me here….@vallittlewood

Girlie the Berkshire Pig….again

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The more I read about the Berkshires and the more I see them, the more I like them. I have an idea for a larger pig drawing/painting/print and have been wondering which pig to choose.

I am rather fond of Girlie who I met at Sylvia’s farm (see “Spotty Dotty and Girlie”) on a very muddy day in Feb and today I made a few more studies of her. The Berkshires are medium sized and have those lovely alert pricked ears and are a smart black/brown with a white blaze, white socks and a white tip to the tail.
For me the sketchbooks are an essential part of working out ideas. When you start drawing, more ideas occur as you work with the shapes, colours and sometimes the personality. This pig has oodles of that.

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“Girlie” sketchbookA4

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and a couple more…. I am almost convinced she is the one for my project.
See more about the Berkshires on Chris’ Salute the Pig Blog.

Pig in Jacket and the Consequences of Fire

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Over at Printdaily this week my printing adventures have involved etching. Yesterday I spent the day going through the process, at a bit of a gallop, from start to finish. The whole process is faffy and time consuming and I had dithered about an image but, eventually with Chris’ Salute The Pig Project in mind I made a scribble based on my sadly lost, but not forgotten, Pig in Jacket.

Etching plate and Print of Pig.. you can read about the lengthy process over at Printdaily here. “

Pig in Jacket” was one of the small treasures that I kept when we made the big move over ten years ago. He was a small, I think about 4 inches high, white porcelain figure. I cannot remember when or where I got him. He had been with me for many years. Today I went back to the photo I found and made some sketches.

Lost Treasure 1. Pig in Jacket

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 The Consequences of Fire

Just over three years ago, on the day I set up my “Buzz”show in London. I received an email telling me that everything I had in the world, apart from the suitcase of things I had taken to the USA, had been lost in a “ catastrophic” fire in Spain.

I had taken a small storage unit, not much bigger than a walk in wardrobe, in a new steel, self storage facility, just to keep the special things in my life safe. It seems so ironic now.
I lost all my paintings and drawings, all my sketchbooks, beautiful old watercolour papers, my stash of now unobtainable professional scraperboard, my fine tools and brushes, gilding equipment, precious pigments, paints, the very special selected books I had kept, all my personal treasures, small pieces of jewellery, hangings and silks from India that my grandmother had brought back in the 1920’s.

My teddy, my old toy dog, my tiny old lead farm animals, my desk, my easel, my book press and countless other small but irreplaceable things which I had tried to keep safe. But the state of the art storage unit protected with alarms, sprinklers, cameras etc  had gone up in flames. It was Spain, at its worst.

Probably arson, possibly an electrical fault. Who knows, and not worth wading through the corruption and concealment to find out. What is gone is gone. I have not mentioned the fire before because I loathe “pity me” blogs and the very best thing to do in these circumstances is to shake yourself down, be thankful for small mercies and get on with life.

Anyway amongst the losses was this pig. Oddly enough I had taken a few snaps of my favourite small things just before I left as I had planned some drawings and the photographs were on my laptop. It’s been in my mind lately to have another look at them, now things are not quite so raw, and Pig in Jacket fits in so well with what I am up to now.

A Previous Incarnation of Pig

It’s not the first time I have used Pig in my work.  Some 23 years ago he appeared in my Devil’s Alphabet, which I am about to reprint. Pig here is rejecting the drunken advances of the Devil.

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The Devil with Pig… A tiny scraperboard drawing. .. and I think there will be a lino cut too.. He was a nice Pig!