Canvas to the Imagination

This is a very photo heavy blog entry because I wanted to document the process of making one of my altered books. I chose this one specifically because it is my first book with movable parts. It was a very involved process and I had a lot of figuring out to do as I went along, but I loved every minute of making it. The idea of making a book with movable parts was motivated by an artist call put out by 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland, which I intend to enter.

The whole process started with selecting the right book for the project, one that was not too thick or heavy, and then I pulled out bits of ephemera to select the visual aspects of the book. I narrowed things down to a set of colourful pasteboard butterflies and started brainstorming ways of how I’d like them to move within the book. I decided the best way to proceed was to make a paper mechanism based on the designs in my book Paper Engineering & Pop-ups for Dummies. Most of the designs were vertical and I needed something to work horizontally, so it meant making a prototype in order to figure out how to make it work for me. Learning by doing is often the only way I can figure things out for myself.

Pictured here are the pieces of the prototype mechanism I made from cardstock. The next step was figuring out where I wanted to place these in the book and how I could adapt it to my needs.

I decided to incorporate two working mechanisms into the design and cut two niches into the book in the lower right and upper left, leaving a layer of pages on either side to hide the mechanisms.

I made two new mechanisms based on my original prototype but smaller so they would fit within the height of the stacked book pages. I needed to leave a bit of space underneath so the paper rod in the middle had room to move freely without catching on the bottom of the niche.

I padded the bottom and top edge of the niche with pieces of paper cut from the book itself.

(I skipped photographing a few steps here). Pictured below is what the book looked like after all of my work with the mechanisms was complete. They were tucked away in working order within the book pages with the middle rod poking through a hole through the top layer of pages. I chose two brass watch parts as the turning knobs. At this point I started figuring out the composition of the book and realized I needed to reconsider the red gears as the platform for the butterflies.

I chose sewing pattern paper as the first layer on the background because I love the yellow brown colour and warmth of the paper. I knew I would add something more to it as I went along but wasn’t quite sure what that would be.

At this point I had also decided to make leaves for the butterflies to sit upon, and these would be the pieces that turned. I made the leaves from green paper with magnolia leaf skeletons layered on top to make them look more real. This is my favorite detail of the whole artwork, and I kind of wish I hadn’t hidden so much of them under the butterflies when I attached them.

The final touches on the book was to add a few more decorative elements to the pages using scraps of Japanese paper and printing a leaf design with a rubber stamp.

There are eight butterflies all over the book, with five attached to the movable leaves and three in stationary positions on the background pages.

After all the work I did on this the actual movement within the book is very simple, it allows one to turn the butterfly leaves in a circle. I kept it simple on purpose because this is my very first movable parts book and there is plenty of room to be more ambitious with future projects.

The finished altered book is lovely to look at and fun to play with. Whether or not this work gets accepted into the juried show at 23 Sandy, it provided me with the opportunity to experiment in new ways and create work I may not have otherwise made.

Materials used: book, sewing pattern paper, Japanese paper, rubber stamp & ink, pasteboard butterflies, card stock, brass watch parts, leaf skeletons, lots of gel medium, and lots of glue.

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a proposal to do a large scale project of altered books. I’ve never done something like this before so it’s been quite a challenge to figure out the best way to approach working with multiple books in a series. Normally I make my altered books as one-of-a-kind pieces and can spend as much as ten hours on each one. For this project I’ve had to simplify how I work with them, come up with a common theme, and develop a process I can apply to making each one.

My plan is to take twenty-five volumes of a set of Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedias and insert natural objects into a niche custom cut from the pages of each book. The book pictured here is the second one I’ve completed, and as you can see the shape I had to cut was fairly complicated. The objects I chose to work with in this piece are two seal vertebrae scavenged for me from Pebbly Beach, Bowen Island, by Anne. The bones are very beautiful and I like their odd shapes protruding from the pages like two gargoyle faces.

I was over on Bowen last weekend and spent most of a walk along the beach and forest collecting things to use for this project. I was a little worried I wouldn’t be able to come up with twenty-five different items but I came home with piles of stuff to work with.

Pictured here are crab bits, drift wood, oyster mushrooms, a pine cone, lichen, seaweed, and bones from a deer. (I had to scrounge through decaying remains to collect those, which is not for everyone).

I’ll reveal more about this project in coming weeks. For now I’m counting down as I work my way through the twenty-five volumes. As of today there are twenty-two more to go.

Our move from the old apartment to the new one has been pretty time consuming over the last few weeks but as of today I am settling into my new studio space. I always find it hard to get back on track with creative projects after a move but I had to recover quickly this time because of an artist call deadline yesterday. There is a book show in the UK I wanted to take part in and it meant creating new work to fit the theme of their show and getting it done by Sunday evening.

This old book wasn’t great to work with because the spine was a bit broken and the pages are yellowed and brittle. I went with it anyway because it was the perfect size for what I wanted to do and don’t have a lot of other small books on hand at the moment. I ended up redoing a lot of work on this book, like folding and unfolding all of the pages because it didn’t work with what I wanted to do. I also had the whole thing complete with arms attached when I decided it needed “something more” and pulled it all apart again to add the cover image.

At first I could not get my head around how to cut an arched niche into the open book pages because I usually do this when the book is closed and flat. It worked out rather well though and is just the right detail to house the apple. I chose to do this as a three dimensional standing piece to try something different. I also wanted the arms to be on the outside of the book and didn’t think their placement would work well in a hanging piece.

The vine “tattoo” on the wooden arms was added by very carefully using a rubber stamp. It’s not easy trying to print a design on a rounded surface without mucking up the design, but I did it. The red thread was the final detail I added because I again felt it needed ‘something more” to tie the whole composition together.

Materials used: book, inkjet print of photo, gel medium, plastic apple, wooden puppet arms, red thread, rubber stamp and ink, and pins.