Canvas to the Imagination

If you haven’t guessed by now the theme for the series I’m working on for the Culture Crawl is “Birds”. The work I shared yesterday is one “style” of altered book I’ll be making, and this book is representative of a second group of books I have planned.

I actually started this series back in March 2010 when I created two niche cut books using imagery of trees and bird-related items. All are made from books that are blank inside and out, because they were publisher mockups for the hardcover version of Harry Potter novels. My friend Siobhan saved them from the bin and gifted them to me for altering.

I’m going to continue to create these using similar elements: a doorway cut into a tree with items related to birds on the inside, and a design printed along the edges of the closed pages. While I really like the use of small twigs incorporated into the previous two books in this series, having them makes it difficult to store/ship the work because they stick out and are delicate.

Materials used: blank book, ink jet print of photo, transparent egg, gesso, book page scraps, wine cork, rubber stamp & ink, and gel medium.

I’m about to let you in on a little secret…I don’t love all the altered books I make. True story. There are some I feel pretty meh about, while others I absolutely adore and will probably have a hard time parting with. This owl book falls into this second group of favoured pieces that I’m not sure I can give up. (But I will).

I’m continuing to use the birds cut from the same encyclopedia as the ones I’ve used in the recycled collages I shared previously. There is a section on owls I’ve been saving and now at least some of these are going to show up in altered books.

As always I’m experimenting with how I work with the books. With this one I’ve folded the pages inward towards the spine but done the middle section at a different level. I wanted to play with varying how I fold the pages rather than keeping things the same throughout the book.

This is the first of two altered books I’ve completed this week. I’ll share the other tomorrow.

Materials used: book, card stock, paper owl, hand-cut leaves, wine cork (which you can’t see), and white glue.

Experiments with new directions in book altering continues, this time with all the pages still attached to the covers. These explorations are part of the planning stages of a commissioned piece for a client, and I wanted to try something different.

Normally I follow the same pattern of folding the pages through out a book but with these two the folds are irregular and create a ripple effect through the book. It’s an interesting technique, but it doesn’t entirely work for me. I need to experiment further to figure out how to do this better.

I may end up removing the covers from these books to use in a collage, and then turn these into a wall piece. I like the idea of the shaped pages rippling from one book to the other.

Check out the work of Issac Salazar for advanced book page folding.