The Making of an artist book WAR GAMES

Catherine Mc Cue, Artist Statement WAR Games 2016

Its strange how first encounters stay with you forever. As a young girl growing up in a family with little interest in the arts my first encounter with images came from my magic lantern slides given to me by my grandmother. The slides where such a rich source of imagery and topics that I enjoyed them still.

War Pig

War Games, for children is one such set of slides, re invented and created as a boxed set,  complete with artist book and contemporary slides.  Materials used include, solar plate etching, embossed linocut, collage slides and text.

 First I started to redraw the images to set the scale and size I needed for the slides, these will be re worked  and printed onto clear film, then mounted and framed.

When happy,  I reworked the images using Photoshop, to add  textured and noise.  As these would be printed out as transparencies the correct size for the solar plates, it was important to consider that line work was well defined to be used with solar plate.

Once printed, the transparencies  are placed onto the solar plate and exposed for 3 minutes. 

Inked up and ready to print in the usual way, intaglio, three at a time. 

The Finished prints, printed in a soft blue. 

 Next, make the book covers, as the solar book is an pull out  style, the two sections are joined together to make up the five images complete with cover pages.

Make the box that will hold all the components together and present and protect the work.

Adding paper elements from an original book on WAR 

Finishing off the slides and framing them.

Adding the blind embossed linocut image to the inside of the box, and we are finished.