My First Art Journal Constructed

Jackie — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:37:38 +0000

My art group is doing a round robin art journal exchange. I’ve done round robins before but never built an art journal. So I did lots of reading and surfing around online, looking how other people construct these things. I absorbed the gist of how it all works and went about doing it my own way. It was a lot of work, but fun. Aside from a little Peltex, some eyelits, eyelit tool and cording I used materials I already had. All hand-dyed fabrics and paper. The paper was packing paper I dyed last summer during the MSU project. I really had no idea how it would look but figured it couldn’t hurt. It turned out pretty cool. I used this book as a reference. I read through various sections several times to figure out my best course of action. I went with the ‘Coptic binding’ for my journal because it seemed to be the best way to deal with all the thick page spreads. I’ll admit that I got myself a little worried at first because this binding sat under the heading of ‘advanced bindings’. Well, my worry was really for nothing. The binding was the easiest part of the project.

The theme of the book is modeled after the ‘books of hours’ from the middle ages. The idea is to have each person create a page around one routine in their lives. Seeing the beautiful in the mundane. So I worked to make the book look like something old, used, somewhat worn and imperfect. Everything is machine stitched, then painted, glued and so on.

I really like the results. Definitely something I will explore again, but maybe a few less page signatures. Now onto my other deadlines!

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My First Art Journal Constructed