Canvas to the Imagination

I did a quick project yesterday to experiment with putting a pull tab mechanism, with object, into a book. I really like the results, though I’m not treating what I’ve made as a finished product. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, think back to those childhood pop-ups books where you come across a tab at the side of a page. Pulling the tab would make something move within the book. Usually the whole mechanism is made with paper, but because I want to eventually make altered books with movable parts I probably can’t only work with paper.

Pictured above is the finished project I made the other day. Below is the simple inner workings of the pull mechanism using cardstock and part of a resistor. The pattern I learned from uses a washer/lever system that comes through a hole in the background paper to attach to whatever should be moving on the front. This method is better suited to moving something back and forth, but I wanted to move the butterflies up and down. I decided to make slits in the background paper for the wires to run along when the tab was pulled.

The tricky part was figuring out how to position the wires correctly through the background paper to match up with the butterflies, and then slip the resistors through the paper once they were glued.

The finished movement isn’t dramatic (pictured below) but I’m satisfied with having figured out a new approach I can apply to something else.

Here’s the top view of the project so you can see that I actually did all of this inside a real book.

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.

I’m not sure about other artists, but I always seem to have a bunch of ideas in the back of my mind that resurface every once in awhile, but never quite make it to reality. I think some of these ideas aren’t meant to be, while a very few seem to be biding their time waiting until I eventually have the right knowledge and skills to make them happen.

I’ve wanted to create art from old books ever since I came across Tim Karpinski’s illustrations painted in a book in a Portland art show two years ago. I made a few attempts at using heat transfer paper to print my photos in books, but the paper was too delicate to take the high temperatures needed for the process and I wasn’t satisfied with the results. Since then I’ve taken up collage which has involved figuring out techniques and exploring an art form that is an alternative to taking photos. It is also more hands-on than photography tends to be these days. I think it was a direction I needed to take in order to learn how to work with the books in the way I wanted.

On the weekend I went to the grand reopening of RubyDog’s Art House and bought (among other things) “New Directions in Altered Books” by Gabe Cyr. It’s full of ideas for turning old books into interesting pieces of art and has inspired me to finally explore my thoughts on creating things from old books.

Today I experimented with my first one, which is featured in the photo at the top of this blog post. It’s pretty basic, and is really more of an experiment than anything, but it was oh-so-satisfying to make, and I want to do more more MORE! (Colour me excited.) The collage contains sewing pattern paper, a silver coin, locking mechanism parts, a metal bird, and a watch face. The red spiral pattern was created with a rubber stamp and ink. I also used gel medium to glue the edges of the pages, and wash of gesso along the edges.