Automata And The Art Of Mechanics
Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about different things that I could write about on here because I didn’t want to get too bogged down just on what’s been happening lately with Amy. I mean not that there’s any problem with that, per se’. It’s my life after all and obviously this site blog thingy is gonna reflect what I’m thinking or doing on any given day. But, in saying that, it should be known that there are great things happening in my life at the moment as well – and even the stuff I’m experiencing with Amy at the moment has a good deal of cool, humorous and happy moments as well.
Anyhow, I digress. I’ve been checking out a few new websites as well as a lot of older websites that I had bookmarked over the past months and years. One of the websites I revisited today was Chomick+Meder : Figurative Art and Automata has got to be one of my favorite sites I’ve been to in the past year! I found it in a book of award winning websites from a few years back, but when I got around to seeing it personally the whole site design had changed. Still pretty bloody good though, methinks!
The characters are just so cool looking and so well made. That’s pretty much reflected in the prices they charge, I guess? Still, I’ve always liked automata and other mechanical artistic stuff but never gone down that path to actually make something as yet? Who knows, one day I might get around to it – along with a crapload of other projects I want to do at some stage in my life!
I always loved modelmaking when I was a kid. All kinds too – from building plastic kits to scenery for train sets and building all kinds of stuff from scratch. I want to get more into that kind of approach and apply it to children’s books. The big challenge there though is that I’d probably want to make the finished artwork “low relief” rather than fully 3D. Foreshortening and making sure everything is still in perspective is particularly difficult as I found out in my first book Woodlore which I did with Dominique Falla. That book was published about 10 years ago now but I’m still pretty happy with the result even though I was new to that sort of thing.
It’s been a bit tougher getting other books published I should add! Everybody says that it’s always the first book that’s hard to get published, but for me that was the easy one. I fell into it really. It just kinda “happened” to me while I was busy doing other things. Well, at the start of it that was the case anyway.
How it all happened is that one day my girlfriend at the time, Dominique Falla, came home from college and said “Do you wanna make a children’s book with me?”, to which I basically answered “Sure, why not?” – never realizing the amount of work that would eventually be involved in getting it finished. Initially it was only going to be a text, 3 pages and a cover that would be done for a “student competition” that Macmillan Books was running. The prize money was $1000 from memory, plus there was the usual certificate type thingy. Dominique said that we were eligible to do the project together as she was in her final year of her graphic design degree and I was in my first year of college doing furniture design.
The book we based our project on – style wise – was a very popular children’s book in the U.K. called…..well nothing actually? It didn’t have a name at that stage, from memory, as the idea was that the readers were given clues within the book that would eventually reveal the name of it. It was a competition and the winner would receive prize money or something like that? A lot of money from memory?
The first person who could come up with a piece of artwork or craft that they had created with the correct name would be the winner. If nobody could guess the name within a year (I think it was a year?) then the competition would be over without a winner. As it turned out the prize was claimed and the book was republished – this time with it’s name on the cover…..It was called “The Bee On The Comb”.
The author and illustrator of the book, Kit Williams, had earlier had a huge hit with another book of his “Masquerade”, in which he’d made a jeweled hare (Although it could’ve been a rabbit?) from precious metals and stones. Then he’d buried it somewhere in England in a very public place, which turned out to be a park. The clues to where the treasure lay were in the book and hundreds, if not thousands, of Britishers embarked on treasure hunts all around the country, thinking they knew exactly where the jeweled hare was buried.
But back to “The Bee On The Comb”. This book, like “Masquerade” before it inspired Dominique and I so much that when it was decided that we’d do our “book” in a similar style. In particular there was one page that impressed us the most – a persons hand made out of Yew and holding a jewel. This was in 3 dimensional low relief – probably about half an inch deep – on a veneered wood panel and painted background. Indeed the rest of the book featured attractive veneers framing beautiful paintings that told the story, but this one page stood out the most to us.
So all we had to do is work out what our story would be about, what pages we’d feature and then I’d have to work out how to do the miniature woodworking part. Easy!
We thought that because the “book” was going to be made out of wood it would be a good idea to make the book about> wood as well, so the concept of Woodlore was born – the name being though up at about 4.30 am at a favorite all night eatery in the city, Fast Eddy’s – sadly no longer with us in Melbourne as far as I’m aware?
I can’t remember how long it took us to make. I do remember driving over to my folk’s house on the morning of the day the project was due, starting up an electric router in the garage at 5.00 am to “just do something quick” and completely screwing the part I was working on! A quick remake of the part over the course of the morning and putting the finishing touches on the rest of the “pages”, before driving like a maniac to Dominique’s university to meet the deadline, with the cover page still clamped up with woodworking clamps while the glue was still drying!
I also remember handing over the work to Dominique who rushed back into the building, while I went to the local pizza joint to eat pizza and wait, crossing my fingers that we’d still be eligible to enter as (I think) we’d just missed the cut off!
But it all worked out in the end. A couple of weeks or so later we were asked to attend a ceremony at a children’s book museum in the country, Dromkeen, where we would be presented with a certificate or two and a winners check. Woo-Hoo!
That same night we were asked by a rival publisher to produce a real full length version of “Woodlore” for them if Macmillan didn’t want to pick it up first? We ended up spending the next two and a half years or so – 7 months of it working full time – creating Woodlore for Omnibus Books and the rest, they say, is history.
