Sidenote about the blog

So, I started out the blog as Scrappy Girl because I was scrapbooking. Then I started photoshop and digital scrapbooking. Now it is book art.  I guess really it is a documentation of my crafting and art projects. I did add a "Book Arts Projects" tab so that all those projects will be in one place and in order and easy to find. Just because it is my latest obsession and to make it easy for Mom to see what I've been doing. :)

Book Arts: Final Project (Photoshop too)

For our final project we were to design a project with a concept and build models and come up with it all on our own. My concept came together pretty quickly early on in the semester. We learned the Daniel Essig method of making covers and these are what I made. At the time I didn't know what I was going to do with them but I did make the covers with the idea of doors in mind. Ever since we moved to Santa Fe I have fallen in love with doors. There are so many beautiful doors around town and we often stop to take a picture.  It took me a month or two to work and rework my ideas around doors and how to make a book out of the photos. And this is what I came up with. I used hinges for the spine and did transfer prints of the doors onto wood veneer. The accordion fold ended up being what worked best for displaying the pages. It's so interesting how at the beginning of the semester, books came together one per week and toward the end we worked for a few weeks on one book.

Note: During the semester I was working in the Media Arts computer lab as a photoshop tutor and on my down time I was able to resize and recolor the photos to give them all the same shape and size and coloring. And they had a free color laser printer where I could print to my hearts content on large paper. I was able to print and reprint until the pages were just right.

Book Arts: Drum Leaf

The drum leaf is a pretty interesting book form. We took a big piece of paper and decorated the paper with paint and stamps and paste paper technique and whatever we wanted, then cut it up into pages. Then we glued them together and added the covers. I think it would be interesting to try again. It was also nice to have a concept that was just the surface of the paper. Especially as we were working on a few books simultaneously. Easy peasy. (Except for the fact that my first paper surface ended up looking like mush because the inks I was using were smearing when they weren't expected to. So I started over again.)

Book Arts: Blizzard and Wire Edge

We had a few choices when designing this book project. Marci taught us about pop-ups (which I used in my ribbon tacket book), wire-edge binding, and blizzard binding.  As I was playing with paper in my workshop I folded a blizzard binding (the "earth" in my book), and because of the colors of the paper I used it really reminded me of the earth. As I played around some more, and took a field trip to Papers! in Albuquerque I came up with this unique book. The wire edge binding involves covering book board and punching holes along the edges so that the pieces of wire included under the paper can then be bound together to form a type of book. Even though this isn't in the traditional codex form of book, pages turning to read from left to right...this is still a book. Because I say so and because it is my art piece.

Note: When I first made this book I wrote my text in my own handwriting. It didn't really work. At Marci's suggestion, I tried again by printing the words on the rice paper with my printer, using a font that matches the map paper.  I like it so much more now!

The words are again my own, written specifically for this project.

Book Arts: ribbon tacket

The concept for this ribbon racket book was seasons or senses. I came up with the concept of colors and their relationship to seasons and holidays. I wanted to show the importance of color to communicate the meaning of the holiday, so I chose colors that were completely wrong for each holiday.

I really liked the concept as I was developing it. But I'm not super thrilled with the outcome. One day I may redo the book if I can come up with a better format to communicate my concept. But it consumed so much of my thoughts I still must share my book. Each section of pages is a different holiday and there is a quote about the meaning of color on the back of each signature. The pages are cut and folded in a graduated manner so that all of the colors of the holiday are showing at the same time. Each signature has a white centerfold with a pop-up showing an image of the actual holiday I am misrepresenting. I call the book "April Fool's Day."

Note: This is my first book to have a colophon. (colophon: a brief description of the book, in this case describing the concept behind the book.) This book has a ribbon tacket, in which the signatures are sewn over the ribbons along the spine.

Book Arts: Collaborative book (accordion)

Every semester Marci has the students in the class do a collaborative book project. This semester we had a botanical theme. The book form was using an accordion made of stained tyvek with pages glued to the mountain folds of the accordion.  The pages have windows cut in them for our two-sided 2"x4" individual pages to go in.  Some of the mini pages were translucent or transparent (such as the leaf collection shown here) and some of them were not. I chose to put the pages in different parts of the pages and because of the size of the paper I used for the book pages, I rotated the orientation of my book, so the spine is across the top. The trick on this book was finding a way to communicate to the reader how to orient and how to open the book. It took awhile but I finally found a way, with the rub-on letter title and the pull tab ribbon on the cover.

Book Arts: personal project

Around this time in class we learned a technique for making covers inspired by Daniel Essig. I used my covers in my final project, but at home I used the technique to make a simple little magic wallet/jacob's ladder book. I have this phrase that I use in an unconditional way that I have been wanting to use somewhere and this seemed like the perfect format. The phrase is: Be Kind. Rewind. A well known phrase to those of us who lived during the time of VCRs and video stores. But in a family with three energetic kids who sometimes yell at each other...this phrase has come to take on new meaning. I have our kids stop after yelling and rewind and try again to say what they want without the anger.

Daniel Essig's method is basically to glue objects to a cover board and then glue some thick paper down over top of the items, put on layers of paint, and sand away parts of the layers to reveal different colors. His books are usually pretty subdued browns and neutrals. I went a little crazy with color on this book but it makes me happy. :) I decided to try some pretty extreme objects under the paper and love that it worked. I used pony beads with letters on them to spell the word rewind and it worked out better than I thought it would. The papers on the back with the other quote are some paste papers I made with my leftover paint from painting the layers of color on the front covers.  I got quite a few paste papers out of that!