Stained Glass Book

Work is progressing  on my volcano book, number three in a series of stained glass artists’ books. The Volcano Book is also part of a series of works about the environment.

Esprimo il concetto che la forma é articolata dal tempo. La storia rigurgita e si ripete facendo sorgere in natura spontaneamente altre domande (conscienze reali). Cresce così una metamorfosi nuova con la possibilità di evolvere aiutandoci a riflettere.   IRMA

You might also like the following posts with content relating to stained glass:

   

Rainbow Cook Book

Illustration for the Appliances Online Newworld Colours Collection Rainbow Cook Book.

I couldn’t get that Dean Martin song out of my head when I was working on this piece. Hannah, who provided the recipe for the colour red on her blog homebakedonline.com, talked about her experiences of working in a takeaway as a teenager. I was trying to imagine a takeaway pizza place in Italy – not a rubbish one but authentic like Hannah  describes – and so the Vespa had to be included. I created a watercolour ink wash which I scanned and dropped in to give the red theme. As well as representing the sky, it has the feel of tomato pulp. The texture also reminds me the distressed walls you find in old Italian towns.   JOHN

Lonsas Twilight Event

LONSAS hosted a twilight event yesterday evening at the London Transport Museum where teachers could meet like-minded individuals and a wide variety of local creative practitioners and cultural organisations.
I was very pleased to participate and offer taster activies relating to my school workshops. Very friendly, relaxed atmosphere and some spectacular results from the teachers – see  example below.   JOHN

Click on the link to go to my LONSAS profile.

Pop-up Workshops

Training up the next generation of paper engineers in Our Lady Queen of Heaven Primary School in Wandsworth last Monday.

It’s amazing how far a little knowledge can go. I also like to think I’m providing a back door (and a pop-up one at that!) to books, reading and writing, as well as helping the fight against graphophobia.   JOHN

World Book Day

A big thanks to the children of Mount Carmel in Ealing for letting me spend World Book Day with them.   JOHN

And thanks to the children in Reception for joining in so enthusiastically
- 1, 2, 3, WATCH OUT IN THE JUNGLE!!!

Giant Cardboard Pop-ups 2

I spent two days last week in Cunningham Hill Infants School in St Albans where I worked with 5 classes of Y1s and Y2s as a visiting paper engineer. I brought along collapsible cardboard frameworks for the children to use to create giant pop-up structures.

As well as working on small-scale individual pop-ups, they worked as a team on the larger pieces. Each class used a story they’d been studying and, in the case of year 2, the challenge was to connect Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Twelfth Night, and paper engineering.

The solution was to produce stage-like structures representing the setting for each play which, believe or not, still folded flat by the end.

I left each class to continue working as I moved on to the next, but nothing prepared me for what I was shown at the end of day 2 (see the bottom photos).  JOHN

It has to be said that none of this would have been possible without the input of a very enthusiastic head and a group of brilliant teachers.

  Y 1

Y 2

             Y  e  a  r    1             

GIANT CARDBOARD POP-UPS

Preparations nearly complete for next weeks school workshops!
Check back later to see what becomes of the structures.  JOHN