Last weekend, I took a look at an ongoing project I haven’t worked on in ages, an altered book that I started in 2007. Well, it came as a revelation, because I realized the book was done in a sort of “proto-signature style.” All the elements mentioned in my previous post are there, mystery, graphic punch, vintage imagery. Plus this work is monochromatic, black, greys and whites, which is a way I love to work and had already decided to resume in the future. You can see the images from the book in the Flickr widget there on the right, click on it to go to the photostream.
In fact, I am thinking I will design a series of images based on the ones in the altered book for Etsy/Café Press, since I already have a visual vocabulary in place, as it were. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish the altered book itself, however! Structurally, it’s a shambles, I truly didn’t know what I was doing. It is built on a real printed book, from which I attempted to remove signatures to allow for the thickness of added materials but didn’t do it very well. Thus, the pages scanned poorly. My favorite spread of women partying on the roof (above) came out badly due to the difference in levels between the facing pages. One side is out of focus, it sits so much lower than the other. The scans also do not show the “mechanics” of pages that are altered with windows and die-cuts, so the fun of actually paging through the book is lost. But regardless of what is “lost,” I have “found” inspiration in my altered book, and there’s plenty of fun than that!!
In fact, I am thinking I will design a series of images based on the ones in the altered book for Etsy/Café Press, since I already have a visual vocabulary in place, as it were. I don’t know if I’ll ever finish the altered book itself, however! Structurally, it’s a shambles, I truly didn’t know what I was doing. It is built on a real printed book, from which I attempted to remove signatures to allow for the thickness of added materials but didn’t do it very well. Thus, the pages scanned poorly. My favorite spread of women partying on the roof (above) came out badly due to the difference in levels between the facing pages. One side is out of focus, it sits so much lower than the other. The scans also do not show the “mechanics” of pages that are altered with windows and die-cuts, so the fun of actually paging through the book is lost. But regardless of what is “lost,” I have “found” inspiration in my altered book, and there’s plenty of fun than that!!
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