Fast & Shiny -- a little book about America's love affair with the automobile.

Hello all,

Aine, I'm so glad you invited me to do this though your ears may have been burning when I was asking myself.....WHY am I doing this?  I can't wait to see what everyone has done and how you all feel about the project. Will any of you be doing editions of the book you have created?

On my blog there is a long article about the experience and included some of my process shots.   Ultimately I overprinted my pages using an inkjet printer and created new covers, relying on my extensive digital printmaking experience and limited book binding skills to rescue me. I had intended to create a very different book.  Earlier in June I fractured vertebrae in my back and it has made me terribly grumpy while limiting my ability to do many things, including focus.  I had to rethink this project many times, since I screwed up so many things along the way,  I'm sure you can relate.  I tell you all of this because for those of you who are not done,  keep at it, it will come together.  

You can see my book on my blog at -- pictured is my inside title page printed on velum with the first page below.   This is my favorite spread in the whole book.  Ann was talking about her interleaved pages and I'm sure they will make her book very compelling.  The 2nd photo shows the book block all sewed together ready for attaching the covers with the printed red marbled paper.

http://marytaylorart.com/blog/2013/07/01/fast-shiny-a-pod-altered-book-challenge/

 

Anna's update

Ok Everyone,

Time to do an update on how I'm getting on.
Well at first , I wasn't keen to do this, mainly because I didn't think I would have the time. I started up and run Green Door Printmaking Studio (now with the help of Pandora, my multi-talented daughter). Thats it..doesn't sound much does it? but take a look at our website, and you might have to change your mind. Theres's only the two of us doing everything. Pan designed and made the website too. www.greendoor-printmaking.co.uk.
Anyway, Aine persuaded me I must do this brief as well!  and now I'm enjoying it a lot. So thank you Aine.

I am now in process of putting my Blurb book back together, after taking it apart, and have decided to collaborate with my friend and associate , Fine artist and Bookbinder Matt Edwards on the project. The book is the result of roughly ten years of work on the subject of 'Nothing' and honing in on death as a major part of it. The prints reproduced in the book are just a few of the body of work done during this time, and hopefully form a readable  story in images. All of the prints are made using innovatory techniques formulated during the 'printmaking revolution' which took place after the advent of the computer age, and adopted by me in Green Door as a part of our more environmentally sound studio, even though I originally trained as a traditional printmaker.
After a lot of discussion with Matt, I have decided to screen print a new cover which will also have little wings. I am inserting very fine japanese paper interleaves with planned screenprints on each which will figure in front of each of the reproduced prints, a nod to old books of etchings which have tissues to protect them. I am also inserting an etching at the end of the book which will fold out when the book is stood on end to display. All the work is combined using natural colours, hand made Japanese papers which I love to use in my prints, and earth toned silk embroidery threads to sew the book together. The print at the end is giving me a headache, being not firm enough to origami, so I have to experiment with this....photos to follow.   Anna

Shadow Boundaries.....update

After battling like mad (it’s the perfectionist in me) trying to make the unravelled concertina book work on both sides, it took me all week to surrender and realise that it just ‘aint gonna’ work, it’s a physical and visual impossibility.

So I ‘hung it out to dry’ as it were and saw that it would work if I concentrated on one side only, displayed it vertically, and perhaps turned the imagery so it views vertically ….

And it was lovely to stop fighting with it.  Some of the double page spread images won’t work quite as well so I will just use the ones that work as a single page.

Now my problem is to work out how to attach the pages together seamlessly…or at least appear seamless!  This is still the dummy book.

sue corr

Shadow Boundaries continued

So I sliced the dummy book open ending up with single sheets (and numbered them very quickly) and started to attach it back together in concertina style adding a few shadowy cut outs in between the pages just to get the feel of the book.

It was interesting and difficult because whilst I was paying attention to the top of the pages as I was attaching them I couldn't see what was happening underneath and obviously the published double pages have been split up and are appearing randomly.    This is bringing to mind Cages' ideas about chance...and just letting the reverse happen of its own accord.

It was quite dark when I took this photo but you get the idea. 

sue corr

Shadow Boundaries

Is there anybody out there?....

A shame not more people are contributing to the blog.

Well for what it is worth here is my blog donation.

I highly recommend Blurb.  Their support service is awesome.  I had a text error on one of my pages of the published book and they have dispatched two further copies for me free of charge.  So much to my delight I have two extra books to play with and I can really wreck one now and stretch the boundaries even further.

So before prising the blurb book apart I lay out the rough pages separately in order to work out how I could add bits in between the original pages

It was at this light bulb moment it dawned on me that there was something printed on the other side and how would this work within my unravelled book?

I am currently looking into the possibility of some laser cutting to lace in between the pages and make a concertina book but I will have to carry on researching with the dummy copy to see how this is going to work with the imagery on both sides

sue corr

Busy Busy Bees are we...............................

I uploaded my 'book' on Friday night to el Blurb.   Let me tell you ......... everything that could go wrong - in the process of uploading  - DID.!!

I had to upload the images three times in total.  I left so many blank pages that I was worried that the software would automatically assume that I was a 'brainless wonder'  and most likely decline from forwarding me through to the point where I could submit the material for my book and just pay the money.

above a screen grab of 12 of the files generated towards 

this altered pod project by Friday night

No discount by the way after all my efforts........... ho hum !!   BUT........  after I'd  had all this frustration and exasperation with the upload............ I just wanted to pay the money and for the task "to be done"........... it truly was quite a contrast to the last time I did an upload.  Friday night probably wasn't the most ideal time to do the upload now that I think on it.

Actually in a typical Blurb manner - they only went and sent me a discount code today........ (tut !!)

  the other ten images I made for the book

Additionally I wasn't going to do anything to the cover and was going to just leave it blank.  I mean I was planning that I would be encasing it, in a hardcover after all, so it was irrelevant.

However in the end I did throw an image on there and inserted the title of the book as Untitled" by 'Anonymous', as the author.
I thought to myself that again the software might assume I had forgotten it and refuse to push it through to the 'printing the book' phase.

 And because I had had so much trouble with uploading it and then locating it, each time I revisited the website to continue working  -  I just wanted it to be finished.  They really could do with a dashboard on there to clearly delineate where to find things.

 I was so exhausted and by then it was two in the morning..........So now I can get back to the intaglio/inkjet print edition I am doing for another project for impact.

I spent way too much time doing the intaglio plate for it using carborundum on Perspex  BUT its done and now I can get on with its background.  I already know how that part is going to look so I just need to try out different media and then select the best one as the 'back ground'.

Its very good to hear how some of you are getting on I just hope those that haven't been posting on here are doing OK?.     Everyone was invited on here to be able to create posts so its not for the want of an invitation.  Perhaps you are all working away quietly and don't have time to write posts on top of all your other commitments.  I can understand that.

As well as getting the imagery finished for this project I also had to send a book off to David Faithful for an artists book exhibition he's curating for another Impact project.  That book is from the most recent edition of 15 books that I made for the Book Art Object Project which I am a member of, these past few years .  Its only the second edition of books I have ever created.

One thing I know about for 2014 and that is that I will not be making an edition of artists books.

Making this unique artists book for me is wonderfully liberating.  Its so good to know I don't have to be limited by the fact that I have to things I know I can repeat 15 times to a high standard.

I can do whatever I like - I just wish I had realised that Blurb books were 'perfect bound' which of course is the most ironic of terminology given that they are very much not perfectly bound.  Had they been in signature format it would have made all the difference.

If any of you become aware of a Print On Demand service that binds their books using stitch then please do let us all know.

I wanted to post some snap shots of what I am up to. I have been working on altering my pod book for the last week or so. Lately the way I work is to print a lot of different elements on Asian papers and cut them out and then colle them. So, I am approaching the book in the same way. Many of the elements to be colled are printed intaglio, some screen. A colleague who teaches book arts showed me how to take the POD book apart and we discussed my possibilities for rebinding. I forgot which one we decided would work the best... Anyway, it will involve sewing, I liked that look much better than the perfect binding. THe content of the book is related to cellular structures as well as patterns that are inspired from India. I have been combining the two a great deal in the last year or so. I think I should be done with the pages, well at least the first round, they may get altered more than once, in a week or so. I am planning on a soft cover as I do not like the way her hard cover examples looked.