Artist book!

Making a full length artist book was much more of an undertaking than I had ever imagined.  I thought I was home free once I had my concept but, oh, was I wrong!!  

This book has to do with the past 8 long years and I found I couldn't put in everything I wanted to, which is just as well.  I had to learn to distill things and figure out when one image would speak for many.  I struggled with the chronological sequence and in the end had to be arbitrary about which pages came in which order.  The Book Arts Roundtable, of which I'm a member, is having a show starting next week at the Pierro Gallery, at the Baird in South Orange, NJ, and this book was made as my contribution.  Since I'm a new member,  this is my first time having a book in the gallery show.   I'm anxious about whether it's  good enough or too controversial.  Tomorrow I hand it in and then I can just let it be.  

As you can see, I used my own paste paper for the cover and I used a Coptic binding.  The "button" is rolled up and glued paper like the cover paper.  The cover pleases me.

Here's my favorite page spread.  I used collage, painting and drawing.  It was a powerful experience working with these images.

I was able to work in some of my prints, relief and otherwise, into the pages.  In this page 

spread the "shock and awe" is a print I did on that subject.

Book Exchange

I've been doing a lot of work lately with a wonderful group of creative artists called The Book Arts Roundtable based at the Baird in South Orange, NJ.  One of the things they do is to have a book exchange twice a year.  Everyone brings a book in a brown paper bag and puts it on the table and then we draw numbers and choose a bag to determine what book we go home with.   Each person shows the book they received to the group and the bookmaker gets to briefly describe their process.  This was only my second time doing this and I haven't really found my "voice" bookwise but I felt pretty good about this effort.  

My book began with scans of some rejects from a woodblock Christmas card I'd made a couple of years ago.   I came across this stash of leftovers--some had dodgy registration and some had too much ink mess in the margins.  I could clean up the margins using Photoshop and then I printed onto some interesting papers I found.    I chose four stages of the print.  For the front page of the book I used just a background print and then attached a vellum layer showing all the colors which could swing out of the way or back into registration.   I had cutouts in the cover to show details of the print.

I'd been wanting to try Coptic binding so I found a book that explained it and got to work.  I used a paper with an Asian theme which had a cloth backing for extra stability since the paper is what holds the signatures to the covers.   It was a challenge to cut the circles through the davy board for the covers but I persevered.   Note to self--find a  circle cutter that is happy to cut thicker material.

I have a Martha Stewart device which does pretty well on paper but the board was too much for it.    I enjoyed doing the Coptic process once I had the concept in my mind.   I wasn't happy with the floppiness of the binding so I added some little straps cut along design areas of the paper and glued them on which worked pretty well.