I'm moving to cindytonkin.com/category/cindy-tonkin-art-work/

I've moved this blog here. 

Blogspot has mucked me around one too many times. 

This one's from the Institute of Art in Chicago. 

Archibald J. Motley Junior: Blues

See you there!

Hellena's Chicago Theatre Piece

I made this tiny 1" by 1" book for my friend Hellena Jang.
We met a few weeks ago in an improv class and she's not feeling well, so I made her a book.
The cover is from a Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind program.
The tiny pages have segments from the Art Institute of Chicago tickets, as well as tickets to see improv shows like TJ and Dave, and Harold teams at iO Chicago.

Rainy Paris Street: a tunnel experiment

Part 2 of my experiment with postcards of impressionist works from the Institute of Art in Chicago
A tunnel book, done with a postcard from Caillebotte's Paris Street Rainy Day.
The soft greys of this picture were hard to manage.
I think i made the gussets too long (7cmx2), but when you hold it up to your face some interesting things happen with the perspective.
Measures 14 x 12cm.
gussets from a Mariano's brown paper shopping bag.
Card is from good and plenty and rice bubbles packs. Covered with pages from America Dances (1927)

Front page is just an off-centre door. I added handles from a paper shopping bag.

I prefer the look of the print and the brown paper to some of the interior!

Saturday in the park: a post-card experiment

So I'm staying in Chicago right now.
I'm improvising a lot and seeing lots of shows, so not much time to make art.
But when I was visiting the Art Institute of Chicago I wondered what a carousel from the Impressionist masterpieces might be like.
Here's how it turned out.
It's Georges Seurat's Saturday afternoon at the Grande Jatte

I'm not super happy with this. More and more I realise it's hard to make a silk purse from a sow's ear: this one is a 1927 book I found dumped in the alley (America Dances). The 90 year old paper is a lovely colour, and the print is great, but the age of the paper means it pills easily and folds badly.
Measures 12 x 14 when closed.
I also feel it's very crowded (he worked it to work nicely with 2d, not with simulated 3d.
and I didn't do such a great job with colour matching: again the 90 year old paper tore and pilled when I tried to spread the watercolour pencil.
Here are some in-construction pictures, just for my own record.

Chicago for the summer

I'm in Chicago for the (northern) summer of 2016.
I've joined the Art Institute, which I'm visiting often (not enough). I'm improvising mostly.
If you'd like to see whaat I'm seeing, then visit my instagram page.
Here's a Monet, a Cornell, a Chagall, a Van Gogh and a few paperweights , just to whet your appetite.

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Three bears carousel

This is part of my altered Golden Books series.
Three Bears illustrated by Feodor Rojankovsky.

the tricky thing is that photographing them makes them flatten out so you don't quite get the fun of the 3d carousel in these pix.

i had to do a fair bit of wallpaper work for the background - not many of the illustrations had enough in them for 3 layers.

materials
paper, golden book, glue (mostly glue stick as i'm travelling right now).
14 x 12 cm when folded shut

i'm worried about goldilocks' head in the bed: it actually sticks out a little when the book is folded, since it's just across the mid line.

see my wall paper work!

I extended these wall papers as well. this one looks really cool in reality because it really pushes the 3d aspect of this book.

the bowl was so big it had to go in, so you have to look hard to see my wallpaper work at the back

This combines three different images from the book. most of the others are single images that i've added to. Poor baby bear's chair. Note some continuity errors too - the small chair in the background doesn't look anything like the small broken chair that baby bear is fussing over! 

the covers are leftover images

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early stage photos (sorry, i only took two pages worth)

Rupert the rhinoceros tunnel

Rupert is another tunnel in the golden book series. 

The original book is Rupert the Rhinoceros.
Illustrations by tibor gergely like Daddies and Scuffy
Tried going one page deeper than usual.  Loved the deepest image best - Gergely's crowd scenes are so wonderful.
Discovered it's impossible to tell the whole story in a tunnel.  i can only tell a moment.
Rupert's story is that he's short sighted so he charges everything. He gets loose in New York andterrorizes the city. Then an optometrist gets him glasses. But people are still afraid. So the optometrist invites everyone to a party to meet Rupert to see he's ok.
This tunnel is just the party invitation invitation.  I used the telephone box as a front cover/ door for the tunnel. 

The secret thing about this book is that i needed a tree for the second last panel so that the crowd scene was far enough away.  I raided a Bambi golden book because there were no new York trees in Rupert (the African ones were no good).

So now we both know the secret. The colors were closer enough and the tree obscured enough for it to work.
Like the rest of the golden book series this book is 14x12cm. It's around 2cm thick when closed.

I'm not really pleased with these photos which were taken in very low light: i forgot to document him when i finished him, and before I put my entire world into storage i took some pix. 

for next time I prefer a more regular cut out on the sides of the book (in the Emperor's new Clothes, for example, I used a circle cutter).