As promised in this morning’s post, here are more pages from Steve Light’s Organ Grinders book:

This book isn’t really a story, just drawings that could maybe become a story. But you can sort of read a mini story in each illustration.

I thought at first it would be a story about one organ grinder -- the guy I drew on the title page. Then to get some ideas, I did some research about organ grinders before drawing more, and it made me start imagining all the possibilities… So I decided to kind of make an account of organ grinders.

One interesting thing I learned is that many organ grinders rented their organs. And they often used the self-playing organs, like those old-fashioned self-playing pianos. If an organ grinder didn’t return his rental regularly, he’d end up having to play the same tune over and over, driving people along his regular route batty.

I had a blast drawing all different kinds of organ grinders, imagining how they might look and how they might dress. And different kinds of animals that organ grinders might work with… and different kinds of organs.

I made this organ that opens (to show its inner workings) using some pages that I cut out from the back of the book, and put down some color on this illustration, and a few others in the book, with pastels.

Fountain pens do not take waterproof ink -- it will damage a good pen. The non-waterproof fountain pen ink does not allow watercolor or the ink lines will bleed, so for the color I used pastels over the ink. Then to get more subtle colors, like flesh on a face, I’d use an eraser in some spots to remove a bit of the pastel and let more of the ink lines show.

I imagined how an organ grinder got paid, just a coin at a time, so I made a page to show off a day’s earnings. The pennies are cut out of copper. I scraped the designs into them with an awl and then rubbed black crayon into the grooves, then polished the surfaces, being sure to keep the black down in the grooves. To attach the metal to paper, I used Liquid Nails.

To see more images of this project and several others by children’s book author/illustrator/toymaker/teacher Steve Light, visit the Koloist flickr page. You can also search “Steve Light” in the search field in the Koloist side bar on this page.

And if you’ve not yet had the pleasure, treat yourself to a visit to www.stevelightart.com

Last week we saw this "antiqued" Kolo Cortina Luxury photo album transformed into an Organ Grinders book in this very cool Kolo hack by Steve Light. He had previously shown how he soaked it in tea… then dried it out over a few days… then what it looked like interestingly worn and warped. He did to this book what time does to a face – he gave it character.

Here's Steve's description of his Organ Grinders illustrations:

I've been working on the Organ Grinders book… here are a few sample pages. This was a big breakthrough project for me. My first published children's books (Puss in Boots and The Shoemaker Extraordinaire) were done in collage, which is fun, but my first love is drawing and I wanted to get back to that.

Anyway, usually I pencil in my drawings first, but for this Organ Grinders book, I decided to draw directly onto the page with ink. It was liberating and exciting and a lot of fun! I’d draw a little thumbnail sketch on a different piece of paper on the side just to get an idea of what I wanted, then draw it again with ink directly onto the book page. I would make little mistakes sometimes, but that was OK because trying to fix and hide the little mistakes would cause me to come up with new creative ideas.

I used a really cool fountain pen called a Pelikan Souverän M805. I had the nib custom ground by Richard Binder (who is very well known in the fountain pen world) and I loved the results! On his web site www.richardspens.com he sells pens and repairs vintage pens and he custom grinds nibs. (There's a questionnaire that you fill out that gives him all kinds of details such as at what angle you hold the pen, how wet you want the nib… people have all kinds of preferences.) I like a lot of ink on the nib because I really like the ink to go down on the page. This pen was ground in such a way that, depending on how I hold it, I can get a broad line, a medium line, or a really fine line. It's fantastic.

The paper was great to draw on. I love the Kolo Cortina Lux photo album -– it's my favorite sketchbook because of its shape and size and great quality archival paper. Normally bleeding or feathering would not happen with Kolo paper, but because I soaked this album in tea and deliberately compromised it, when I drew on the dried pages, the ink did bleed a little. In this case, I didn't mind, because I was going for that aged, wonderfully imperfect look.

I even deliberately splattered ink on some of the drawings, which the high quality fountain pen I used normally would not do, either! But sometimes you want to create those "flaws" in your art to achieve a certain look. Like the stains you see on the pages – those I created on purpose by leaving tea leaves directly on the pages while I was drying out the album.

More of Steve Light's Organ Grinders drawings later today. Stay tuned.

More photos are taken during the holiday season than any other time of year. Getting all the good ones into albums can seem daunting, but here's a great suggestion from the book Photo Album, The Essential Guide to Sorting, Sharing + Keeping Photos by Vanessa Holden and Susie Cushner:

Photo Sleeve Albums:

Ready to be filled with photos, these books are the simplest to use and offer instant gratification. You don't need corners, tape or a ruler -- the sleeves do all the work. Photo sleeve albums are also more flexible than scrapbooks in one respect: you can remove photos instantly. This makes it easy to "borrow" a picture from one project and reproduce it for another, or to move pictures from place to place in the layout. Most photo sleeve albums leave room for labels or handwritten notes...

Shown here is an archival-quality Kolo Hudson three-up photo album.

There’s more information about this book at www.kolo.com . Kolo is selling it on their web site and it is available at many retail stores that sell Kolo albums, which are listed on Kolo’s store locator. Previous Koloist posts about this book by can be seen here and here.

- Ugo

Artist and toymaker Steve Light shared this photo of his handmade "Happy Winter!" holiday cards. The rooftops of the houses (or Christmas tree branches, depending on how you see it) are Kolo photo corners colored with green chalk-soft pastel, and the snow is dots of White-Out. Who knew you could paint with White-Out?

- Ugo

Last week we saw this Kolo Cortina Luxury photo album soaked in tea... then dried ... and then warped to perfection. Here's an update from children's book author and illustrator Steve Light on his project:

So now I had the new album looking old and worn and well-loved, and I decided to go with an old-fashioned organ grinder theme.

I made this wood monkey with an organ and crank for the cover window. I drew it on a piece of strong, thin plywood – the kind used to make model airplanes --.and cut it out using a jeweler’s saw, so I could cut the intricate shape and get the details I wanted. Then I stained the wood and colored it with brown and red pencil to make it look old.

The piece of paper behind the monkey in the cover window was blue paper that got a little tea-stained when I soaked the album in tea. I liked the effect.

The original idea was to make the album look like an old scrapbook that an organ grinder might have owned. I imagined that maybe he had some promotional flyers and tickets, like if you gave the monkey a penny, he’d give you a ticket for a show…

…so I made the flyers and tickets with colored paper and waterproof ink. After they dried, I sanded some of the ink away, and crumpled them up and bent them and rubbed the corners. I even threw them in my bag to bang around in there to help “age” them.

When the album was soaking in tea, I had thought the covers might separate, and decided if they did, it would look cool to staple through them. Turned out it wasn’t necessary, but by then I wanted to do it anyway. I had this heavy duty stapler from another project and thought it would be cool to just staple the flyers and tickets to the scrapbook cover. Then I thought it could look like maybe the organ grinder’s scrapbook had been coming apart at some point and he just stapled through the covers to hold it together.

But the staples looked shiney and new and I wanted this thing to look rough and old, so I painted the staples with brown lacquer ink to make them look rusty.

Next, the inside of the scrapbook...

- Ugo