Chapbook: A Humble Pot of Beans, part 1

i'm starting another new chapbook today. i spent the better part of the week drawing and doing the lay out. this one is going to be a small recipe book revolving around black beans. i make black bean soup often, and usually i make more than i need so that i can have leftovers, but it gets pretty boring eating bean soup all the time. so for this new chapbook i've taken one pot of beans and transformed them into 4 meals and 2 snacks or sides. if you are wanting to give meat a rest for a week, this will be the book for you!

sketchbook ideas, recipes, and layout.

as i started thinking about this recipe book project, i realized that i do this every week. when the food is running low, i sit down with mindy and we hash out what we want to eat for the next week, planning our menu. so this is just an extension of my weekly meal plan.

we always have leftovers and i am not much for eating leftovers, so i always have to find ways to reinvent what i made for dinner last night. sometimes successfully, sometimes i make garbage soup. so, for this book i make it a point to find ways to make different meals using the same main ingredient.

the full block...this is gonna be a nightmare to cut

beans are the perfect base for making a lot of different meals, so i went with my favorite: black beans.  the recipe book starts with making a big pot of bean soup, then convert those cooked beans into bean burritos, cajun bumblebee, and bean burgers. then there are two side dishes or snacks made from the leftover leftovers: bean dip and black bean cole slaw. in all, there are 10 recipes. all of which i wrote out backwards on the block. my eyes went crossed on many occasions.

i'm just starting the carving, i'll keep posting updates. follow @zmedstudios on IG for real time updates. hopefully these will be ready in a week or two!

burrito instructions

isn't soup the best thing ever?

my black bean soup recipe if you can read backwards

grocery list

the moon.

Zach spent an afternoon in the studio and came home with this painting ...

When he first texted a picture of it to me, I thought he was showing me a photograph of the moon he took the night before. It is that mesmerizing, which is truly amazing for a aerosol painting!

Chapbooks

our lives have gone through some serious change over the past year. our daughter arrived in december, and since then we've been pretty well occupied, time, thought, and temperament, with her. it has certainly taken a toll on our online presence, since we are reluctant to share much about her on social media. but it's time to get back to talking about art, studio, and life in the midwest.

while we've been sitting at home during the fourth trimester, i've been carving blocks in the garage studio, then going to the freezing studio uptown to print. in thinking through the experience of art, i've been enamored with the way the public consumes art and ideas. so instead of making prints to display on a wall, i've been making books. there is an intimate connection with creating art that requires touch and time, and books are probably the most basic 4D media. mindy and i are both kind of bibliophiles and our bookcase is a huge aesthetic feature of our home. we visit used book stores when we travel and usually return from art exhibits with the show catalog or some other giant art book.  with that in mind, i've begun producing my own series of book called Chapbook.

here is a short video of the first book entitled 'landscapes, volume 1.' this book features 8 different prints of contemporary midwestern landscapes, and was more or less the tester for this project.

Chapbook #2 is entitled 'this past year' and is a quick view of what our 2015 was like. there were a lot of changes in our lives last year, from mindy finishing her PhD to painting murals to having the baby in december. our journey is depicted across 14 different prints in this book.

here is the linoblock mid-carve. i draw everything in pencil, then go over the lines in sharpie to help define the darks and lights that i want to pull out of the image.

stupid small details on a linoblock. singapore food we miss you.

first pull of the full page

here's a short flick of me folding cutting and assembling the book. it is one print on one page that becomes a 16 page book with a few folds and a few cuts.

happy first month

Sage turned a month old in a blink of the eye. To celebrate, we dyed some eggs red. 

It is so cliched to say this, but I already miss her as a wee tiny baby. All five and a half pounds of her.