Inspirator for Book Artists

I’ve been struggling for inspiration lately. I went on the web to look for ideas for overcoming artists block and found all sorts of drawing and painting exercises. A lot came with a time commitment, a drawing a day type thing, but I know from past experience that these will go the way of keeping a sketchbook, started with enthusiasm and then fizzle.

I also found sites offering packs of cards that have prompt words on , the idea being that you deal out a certain number and work to these. I always work best to a project or brief so these looked like a better fit.

Then I thought a book artist ought to have these prompts in book form. So I’ve spent the past three or four weeks making the ‘Inspirator for Book Artists’

 I wanted to get away from the towering pack of cards and also to try and make it so that I couldn’t cheat and pick out my favourites but I thought it would be useful to be able to put the chosen prompts out together on the table and be able to move them about and rearrange them

I decided to make volvelles (turning discs) to show the chosen words.

For making books I decided that there two categories of words that needed choosing, technical things like text, image, structure also more creative prompts. I also decided I needed a number generator. I thought about using a die but decided that a volvelle worked better , I didn’t need to work out how to incorporate it into the structure.

The first mock up looked like this. The discs slotted into an adapted  crown binding

Unfortunately when I’d made the volvelles out of card and the binding out of canson paper it was too bulky and springy. I rethought and decided on a box structure on its side so that it is displayed and opened as a book.

 

Now it is made I need to use it

I used the ‘rules’ to dial up some words. Now I just have to make it happen

Find the Lady

The theme for NWBA this month was ‘Puzzle’ and the theme for PAS was ‘Inspired by...’

I was struggling with both but while I was watching a repeat of Jonathon Creek I saw him fiddling with a magic box and thought you could put a book in that and it grew.

The idea of the box seemed to fit well with close magic and card tricks. ‘Find the lady’, a card trick con, fitted with the idea of disappearing.

I thought this worked well with the idea of the turn of the century (19^th)travelling show sideshows  and circuses . I found copyright free images of clown from around this era and made cartes de visite with the clowns on them (very often photographers produced these cards with celebrities of the day as a money making exercise) to use instead of the number side of my playing card inserts. These are all men.

 It’s not enough to produce the book out of the magic box, to ‘Find the lady’ you have to dismantle the drawer to find her hiding underneath.

 

 

Part way there

I’ve managed to move two projects further on

The 20:20 print exchange is half way through printing. The prints are drying under weights at the moment so posting pictures have to wait until later in the week.

And I’ve started on a book for the next meeting of the North West Book Artists. The theme is Tracks

I decided to use this as a reference to music tracks. Specifically those tracks that may not be your ideal choice of music but which take you back to a time and a place.

Tracks from my youth were on vinyl records so I started making a mock up based on circular pages.

I decided that the spine was too prominent in this version so I stitched it together. This has the advantage of making the structure circular.

Given that this will involve a lot of text I’m making the pages on the computer. Some are easily identifiable....

some more obscure.