Altered Book: The Beginnings of a New Series

March 10, 2011

I’m just starting to work on a new series of altered books in preparation of a group show later this year. The theme of said show is Fairy Tales, which thankfully will prove to be a rich source of inspiration for all those involved.

My initial thoughts around the work I plan to create is to combine altered books with my figurative photography. On Tuesday I sat down in the studio to explore some of the ideas I have about bringing these two mediums together.

I want to combine photo-based figures with found objects within a book. I plan to shoot new material (read: models) to use in these fairy tale themed books, and first steps involved figuring out how best to photograph the models for what I need. The book pictured here was an exploration of materials because I wasn’t sure what format the final output of the photo-based figure should take. I played around with an inkjet print on plain paper and then pulled out a photographic print to work with.

The photo I used in this was a self portrait I shot down at Kits beach two years ago. I purposely did not worry too much about composition or selection of materials with this mixing of media because I just wanted to explore the idea. My biggest concern was finding a print material for the photo-figure that would not be difficult to cut out, and it looks like photo paper works just fine.

I’m excited by this new work and can’t wait to see where this series will go.

Materials used: book, tissue paper, small stones, small shells, photograph, wood tiles, and gel medium.

Butterflies, Paper & Leaves Collage

February 24, 2011

This is the last of the old heat transfer experiments recycled into art that I started working on last week. I ended up completely covering up the original image printed on this cradle frame because it didn’t work well in the collage.

I don’t feel I do this random style of composition well, so I was finding it tricky to know when to stop layering things. It’s just on the edge of having too many things going on and becoming a mess. But I love the papers overlapping and the colours are fun.

As with the previous collage pieces, this is available for purchase through my Etsy shop or in person.

Recycled into Art

January 17, 20113 Comments

I’ve been collecting toilet paper rolls at home since the end of the summer. I had vague thoughts of eventually making them into “something”, but I was also interested to see how many would accumulate over time. The toilet paper roll is a one-time-use disposable item everyone has and pretty much ignores. But it’s made of perfectly good light-weight cardboard I was pretty sure my paper craft explorations could make use of.

I recently brainstormed a few ideas for the rolls and today did some playing around with them. I was less focused on making a finished product than I was on seeing the reality of roughly sketched ideas. These are crude unfinished pieces but I learned much from the doing. I can see I’m going to make something BIG out of these.

Exploring and experimenting with new ideas, materials, or processes is unbelievably important, and yet it feels difficult to justify the time because it seems like play instead of work. I’ve frequently struggled with different aspects of this mindset in my first year of being a full time professional artist.

I have much more to say on the topic, but for now, let me ask you: how do you distinguish between play and “real” work in your life or daily job?

Yuletide Christmas Gif

December 22, 2010

I wanted to shoot a fun portrait of Boris and myself to send out as a digital Christmas card. We finally got around to doing this the other evening but I wasn’t quite happy with the results. The portrait wasn’t creative or fun enough to suit me so I decided to take seven photos from the series and make them into an animated gif. I’ve never done this before but It was really fun figuring out how to put it together in photoshop. It was relatively simple too. And now you can watch Boris and I kiss over and over and over…

The tutorial I used is for Photoshop CS3, if you want to make your own animated gif.

Capturing Process

October 8, 20102 Comments

The Culture Crawl will be having a juried preview show at The Cultch. It will coincide with the Crawl itself and entice people to visit some of the artists in their studios. This year they’ve asked the artists to show the process of their work rather than a finished piece. I’d been racking my brains for a way to do this and finally had an “Ah ha!” moment yesterday morning on what to do.

The top book is one of the test encyclopedias I experimented on to come up with ideas for the Forgotten Knowledge project. The scrap pages are ones cut from other books along the way. I save these because they can always be made use of. The stack of books and random objects are items I’ll be using in future books.

This was the best way I could come with to capture my process because I don’t do sketches or some other form of brainstorming. It all happens very spontaneously for me.

Altered Book: Experimenting with Pull Tabs

May 13, 2010

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.

Altered Book- Experimenting with pull tabs-3

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.

Altered Books: Little Bottles & Paper Flowers

January 23, 2010

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.

Altered book collage

September 16, 20092 Comments

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.

Variations of film in a holga camera

September 5, 2009

When Boris and I were in Victoria earlier this year I came across the motherload of medium format expired slide film in a small camera store in Bastion Square. At first I was hesitant to buy it all because most of the film was 220 and I wasn’t sure I could shoot this in my holga. For those not familiar with film formats, medium format film come in 120 rolls which allows for 12 exposures or 220 rolls which allow for 24 exposures (this varies with the type of camera). The larger roll also doesn’t work with every medium format camera, at least that’s what I’d been led to believe. I went ahead and bought the lot deciding to take my chances because of the cheap price of four year expired film.

The shots I’ve included in this blog post were the first taken on the roll of 220 with a holga. As you can see, I had a lightleak and it went through the entire roll. With 220 film the whole camera has to be taped up, including the window at the back of the holga, because the film doesn’t have a paper backing the way 120 does. I’ll add more tape for next time. The trickiest part of shooting 220 is keeping track of the number of exposures because you can no longer see the numbers at the back, as well as being careful to count the number of clicks between frames.

For more detailed instructions on shooting 220 film go read “How to Use 220 film in a Holga.”

Testing to Create

December 17, 20086 Comments

I love this piece. It actually started out as a test to see how a particular Japanese paper (I don’t know the name of) looked layered over the gel medium transfer I’d done of one of my tree photos on wood. I did a test of each colour of paper – green, blue, and an off-white – and suddenly it was becoming a composition rather than just a “test piece” for collaging techniques. The leaf skeleton, splashes of watercolour, bird stamp, and coating of gel medium were further additions to make it complete.

On another note, I’ve been having doubts about making Christmas presents versus buying them. My thoughts are whether handmade presents are less valuable, or maybe less valued, than something store bought, and is it cheaping out to do things myself. I know this isn’t true, and I love it when friends gift me items made with their own hands, but not everyone appreciates a handmade item. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Canvas to the Imagination

Rachael Ashe – Art | Craft | Life

Category: Experimentation