My Week In Solitary

I recently was the only one at work in my area, alone with access to collections storage and pretty much alone in one end of the basement of the museum. It was me and Mr Goble one on one. I surveyed the illustrations for four or five of his books, about a hundred all told. You would think it would get boring but it didn't. In fact I enjoyed really delving into his work, which continues to amaze me. I am noticing tendencies in how he does things. For example, when he includes wild animals in his pictures there are either one or there are pairs of them. Something I noticed earlier is that his illustrations are put together in a really interesting format that makes them  ready for the printer to use when producing the books. Since I worked in commercial printing at the time these books were being printed, I recognized what he was doing. He started with a hand drawn ink image of the black lines and shadows; then that was printed in a light blue called non-repro blue that would be invisible to a graphic arts camera and then he painted the color parts around the blue whic acted as a place holder for the black ink of the printing process. It's really ingenious. Nobody else in the museum had my printing experience so didn't quite understand what they were looking at. I should say that I think I understand his method; I am going to write him to find out if I am correct. My boss has asked if I would be willing to do a presentation on my summer with the Gobles to the Museum Guild. I said I would be happy to. I know, that doesn't really sound like me. In fact I did a presentation about my very first exhibit that I curated today. More on that later.

The black ink drawing

Color paint around non-repro blue

M-I-C-K-E-Y     a little detail Mr Goble snuck in