Altered Books

book1

book1- finished

book2- beginning

At first I had no idea what I wanted to do for my altered book project. I decided to purchase my books first and see if they gave me any inspiration. I tried to find books that had any color in them because I thought it would be interesting to have color in my project. I found two books I liked, one smaller one with thicker pages, and one large, skinny book with many thinner pages. I knew the larger one would be a lot more difficult to work with but half of the book was colored illustrations of flowers. Right awa the flower book gave me the idea to do some sort of vase with flowers coming out of it. I was thinking about doing a mix of geometric folding and more organic, curvy cutting.

I began with the smaller book as a practice, doing all sort of folding and cutting to see what gave me the most interesting shapes. When I figured out what I wanted for the flower book I moved on to that one. I began by cutting the base, but every small cut I wanted to do had to go through ~500 pages. It was very tedious. I went back to my first book and cut it in half. I finished folding and cutting all of the top pages and it sort of looked like a boat's mast, caught in the wind, waving around. I made a boat bottom out of rolled pages, a nice contrast to the very angular, folded top. I hot glued the pieces together, and then had to find a way to either make it stand, or hang it to make it into a wall piece. With the rounded bottom I could not think of a way to make it stand without putting an additional base on it and I did not want that. I found soda can tabs and hot glued them to the back to make a hole to tie the string onto. Again, I had gluing problems because the hot glue did not stick well to the cover of the book which is the blue part on the top of the bottom piece.

For the serial planes project I initially though of the ribcage when the project was introduced. I liked the idea of seeing inside a ribcage. I also knew that will lots of negative space there would be interesting shadows case by the ribs and spine. I researched other serial plane objects, the art work of Holton Rower (the poured paint, and the money sculpture), planets, topographical maps, different parts of the New Haven train station, things around my house, and of course, ribs and vertebrae. I fell in love with the rib cage idea and started working right away. I made a model to figure out the technical part of keeping the ribs on the spine, and found out that if I made the notches the right way I could attach them with no glue. It was difficult to make such small notches in the foam core, but I think it was worth it. The other problem I had was making a base to stand my ribcage up. I wanted to keep it consistent with the design so I made the top of the pelvic bones. I made one solid piece and added different sized smaller pieces to the front and back to make it sturdy enough to hold up the ribs. I am very satisfied with how the base turned out, I was unsure if it would support the top, but it did!

I enjoyed the foam core project more, because there was more freedom and I had a real vision. The book project was difficult but also interesting to have that sort of limitation of the spine holding the pages together. I enjoy making one form disappear and making a whole new thing come from it. And that was really what we did with both the book and the sheets of foam core. The foam core was hard and frustrating to cut sometimes but in the end it just took patience a lots of x-acto blades.