Canvas to the Imagination

This is one of those pieces where I began without a plan and just followed wherever the book wanted to go. I wanted to create another folded page book using the same fold pattern as I did in a previous work but I had no idea where I would go from there. I tend to select objects and materials to inspire the direction of the work, but this time I didn’t do that.

This is a book of four hundred and thirty pages which means I folded about two hundred pieces of paper. When I finished folding I played around with the paper further and eventually decided to roll the pages underneath one another. I added colour and pattern using a rubber stamp, first in yellow and then in green. I actually had the whole thing close to completion when I decided the yellow wasn’t strong enough colour over the text. I had to go back, unroll all the pages, rubber stamp them, and then roll them again. The butterflies were the final element and their bright colours are the perfect compliment to the crazy folded background.

Materials used: book, rubber stamp and ink, paper butterflies, and lots of glue.

I bought the four little old men made of clay on an impulse back in the fall. I was killing time in one of those everything-and-the-kitchen-sink Asian shops one rainy day, and decided to look for tea cups to use in an altered book. I found the tea cups and decided little clay men would be a good purchase as well. Last week when I began brainstorming ideas for a new altered book I brought them out and decided I needed to make them a cherry tree to sit under.

The little men are slightly set into the book, which is the least noticeable part, but took me a few hours to cut the four niches into the pages. The blossom flowers were made by using a paper punch and then stringing them together with a needle and thread. I used origami paper for both the flowers and the lovely blue background. The tree trunk is a rolled up page within the book with ink rubber stamped to create bark texture.

Materials used: book, origami paper, clay figures, rubber stamp and ink, and lots of glue.

Those tiny bottles I started working with a few weeks ago have all been filled with things and have at last made their way into an altered book. I raided the spice rack for the bulk of the filler, selecting herbs and spices based on colour and texture. One of the bottles is filled with tiny seeds from Yuuki’s food. I decided to fill the brown bottles with random inedible items and have something sticking out the top of each because they are too opaque to see inside.

When I first envisioned the bottles in a book I thought I would put them in orderly rows as if they were on shelves, but as I started to create the composition it seemed more interesting to stack them and have the rows overlap. I had to decide exactly how they would be arranged before I could start cutting into the book, and I had to maintain the same arrangement in order to make them fit back in.

The bottles inspired thoughts about alchemy, potion mixing and magic so I used this as the jumping off point as I chose the finishing touches for the composition. The book is lined with sewing pattern paper with lines and symbols that make me think of star charts, and the colour of the paper seems old and yellowed. Every other object I chose is metallic – various coins, a locking mechanism and a key – to tie into the transmutation of metals often associated with the art of alchemy. The copper coil in the center of the book was made by winding wire around a skewer. I added the same copper wire to the seven brown bottles because they looked too plain as they were.

Materials used: book, sewing pattern paper, locking mechanism, coins, rusty key, glass bottles, copper wire, dried flowers, metal chain, pencil crayon, bamboo stick, map fragment, book page fragment, feathers, bird seed, and various herbs and spices.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I started this altered book wanting to change the look of the folded pages by punching flower shapes into the paper. I was going to do this throughout the entire book but the more pages I did the less effective it seemed as a technique because the punched out shapes did not show up very well. So I changed my idea and decided to work with the flowers I had created with the punch and used these as the centre piece. I wanted the flowers to flow loosely and could not imagine gluing each one individually into the book, so I came up with the idea of stringing them together with thread. Only some of the flowers are directly attached to the pages with glue.

I was curious to see how well gluing a ceramic tea cup into the book would hold up and it seems to have a strong bond with the paper around it. I’m excited about this because I have another idea with tea cups that I have yet to explore. The little green bird was added as a finishing touch because I felt the composition needed a little more life and colour to it before I could call it finished.

I wasn’t sure what to title this but the flower shapes remind me of cherry blossoms and my thoughts these days are turned to spring, starting new things, and awakenings.

Materials used: book, paper punch, thread, Japanese paper, card stock, and a metal bird.

Last Saturday I was playing around with coriander seeds Boris had brought home from his food shopping trip. There were a few scattered on the kitchen table and I started to wonder what they’d look like in the tiny bottles I’ve had waiting in the wings for their own altered book to call home. I loved how they looked in the bottle so I went searching through more things for different items to try. The photo above shows what I came up with: coriander seeds, feathers (thanks Jess), dried rosemary, and salt. As I’ve mentioned before, playing with materials is the best way I’ve found to come up with ideas for my altered book art. It moves me from abstract thinking about objects and the vague ideas I have, to playing with them and clarifying what works and what does not. Now I know I do want the bottles to contain things, and it makes me realize they’ll need to be sealed. I have an idea about that too which I need to explore.

The paper flowers in these two photos are from the altered book I just finished this week. The flowers were created using a flower-shaped paper punch on the book pages. It was an experiment because I wanted to see what the book would look like with pieces of the pages removed, but it wasn’t a very effective technique this attempt. It did leave me with piles of flowers and I decided to string these together and make them part of the composition in the book.

More on the finished book later this week. I haven’t yet had a chance to photograph it.