During the briefing, we discussed authenticity and how much we are willing to share in our work. I usually avoid sharing too much in my work because whenever I do it I feel like it ends up being too vague and I tend to get stuck when reaching something that I can't or don't want to put into words.
Identity is, for me a difficult topic to approach. I feel quite fragmented and like there isn't a place where I can feel like I fully belong. Living in england, I often feel like I am missing something when I a, talking to other people, like some unspoken rules or context that I will never fully understand because I was not born here, something feels just slightly wrong or amiss so that it's so vague sometimes I think it's just inside my brain. But going back to my home country does not make me feel better since I have gotten used to the independence that I have here. Going home, I still feel like an outsider because of the gulit of leaving everyone behind, as well as the fact that I cannot conform to certain standards that are expected of somebody living there. Although I have talked to a lot of people my age that go trough pretty much the same things I still feel lonely when thinking about my own identity as it is something that uniquely mine and different for everyone lese so we can never fully understand what we've all been trough.
Staring the identity project, I'm not sure which brief to choose. Normally, I would definitely go for the 6th one, with materials as I enjoy working with unusual materials and trying new things to be able to establish a connection between the themes of my work and the means of creating it. However, I am considering trying something new as its the first brief of the year, so I feel inclined to choose one of the digital identity briefs. One of the things that I considered writing about in my contextualization is escapism, specifically in science fiction and fantasy media, and the idea of creating a fictional world to emphasise certain issues, as well as overdoing escapism to deal with feelings of hopelessness and how the abundance of digital media affects this.
Identity - Materials
I think exploring collage could be a great way to explore the concept of identity by using a mix of materials that can convey aspects of an identity. I could use some pieces of materials that are relevant to me, such as tissue paper or gift wrap. Throughout my life, I have struggled with maintaining relationships which has sometimes made me start hoarding a lot of things that remind me of my relationships or of past versions of me, or of feelings that I've felt that I thought were important at that moment. Coming to uni has challenged that as I have to move often and I only have a small room to keep all my stuff in.
This brief could be a way to discuss that by finding a way to use pieces of materials from those memories and piecing them together in a meaningful piece that can remind me of my past and make me feel like I don't have to mourn every piece whenever I declutter.
I started to look at collage artist to observe the ways in which they select materials appropriate to the themes they tackle and piece them together to emphasise the message of the piece on a material level.
Catherine street is an artist baesed im scotland whose work tends to be quite ambiguous. I enjoy looking at her work because of the many layers she constructs. The textures in her work translate well even trough a screen, each layer revealing more about the piece.
I particularly like the way in which she uses organically cut pieces of paper and combines them with simple black and white text, creating an interesting contrast.
Because of my lack of experience with typography, when I want to write in my work, I tend to resort to hand written cursive, which is less legible but feels more at home in my work. In contrast, Streets' text is bold, but it does not feel wholly out of place.
As someone who struggles with typography and using writing in general in my work, I think trying out some of her text collage techniques in my work would be helpful when trying to make a cohesive piece that blends both type and imagery.
andisheh avini
Hew Locke
'In collaboration with British Museum curators, he has selected objects from across the collection, interspersed with some of his own works, to explore histories and legacies of British imperialism from the early modern period to the present day. Rather than seeking to condemn or celebrate Britain's imperial legacy, Locke's engagement with the British Museum collection instead shows the ways in which it informs so many aspects of contemporary culture that we take for granted, and to leave the audience with questions.'
- The British Museum
Hew Locke uses his work to comment on British imperialist and colonialist culture, by creating sculptures covered in fake (chains, plastic objects, coins, and many more things he finds) regalia, but who has also collaborated with museums in the past to create installations using real artefacts.
The message of his work feels undoubtedly clear through the use of unique materials. Even with the fake regalia, the gold and general abundance in his sculptures is powerful enough, and his work feels highly critical, despite what the British Museum claims. However, I wonder how his collaborations with museums affect his work, since the history of museums in the UK feels like the opposite of what his work shows.
Claire Harvey
easily removable people
What I find particularly interesting in Claire Harvey's work is the use of blue-tack(?) in her pieces.
Digital identity
My art life timeline
Doing this, I found it easier to analyse and write about my younger years and what I used to do back then since now that it's been a while I can gage what was important or a monumental moment. In contrast, although what I've been doing in my uni years has been more relevant for an art career, I can't tell what will truly leave a mark on me. I think this can change as I age, since, for example, while I was in high school (15-18yo), I never particularly thought of my 11 - 13 year old period as particularly important, but looking back I can see how everything impacted my life way more than I realised.
To analyse this period of my life I could start looking at media that tends to bring me back to that time.
I try not to dwell too much on the past since it makes me sad to think I won't feel that exact way again. There is a certain carefreeness that I didn't even know I had during that time. Although I think it's natural to assume that our problems of the present are the biggest and hardest thing ever, the fact that changed is that right now I feel burdened by other peoples' issues whereas when I was young, even though I still fell worried it was never that consuming.
doodles
At this point i felt like none of my thoughts were taking this project anywhere, so I decided I need to stop thinking about it without creating anything. Since the 'identity in materials' brief was the most tactile/tangible one, I decided to explore that further. Although my mind had initially gone to collage, I decided to stray away from that and to instead explore materials in different ways.
My new plan of action was to round up all the materials that I can find that are more on the unconventional side, and create small zines dedicated to exploring one of every material to assess them on their own.
I feel like I often create work by throwing everything I have at the page, so I believe that focusing on one material for a whole zine will make me become more mindful of how the material itself affects the meaning of my work.
USEFULL USELESS
I decided to make a book using only mostly-used-up pens.
Last year when I was moving out, I had to declutter quite a bit. When I got to cleaning through my pens and art supplies I was a bit emotional since I'd had a lot of them for years and even though they were pretty much useless and dried out at that point I still felt sad to let them go(especially since I got a lot of them from home). While I was testing them out to see which ones do not work anymore, I found a blank book and I decided to use the pens to give them one last opportunity to create something before chucking them in the bin.
images from the book I made last summer
I wanted to recreate that right now but in a more image-based way since the previous book was mostly made up of text. I also wanted to explore this idea again, but the book I made last summer was never really meant to be shown to anybody, so it was pretty rough and a bit weird.
At the centre of this book were my thoughts on usefulness and uselessness, which often conflict, specifically that the pens had emotional value for me since I brought them from home, but since they lost their main purpose (drawing/writing) I still had to throw them away to save myself from filling up the limited space that I have. In a way, (although a bit of a cheesy comparison), the pens are similar to the memories that I have from back home. I had to let a lot of stuff go when moving away, and I can't help but think a lot about whether the decisions that I made were right, but I can't change anything either way so these thoughts are useless and needlessly clutter my mind.
I used 2 A3 sheets to create 4 big images using drying pens and other items I find pretty useless like these dot stickers I have had since first year. I then folded and cut them up to create a book.
In a weird sense, I thought this is kind of like an auto-biographical zine for the pens, since am drawing with them about them, so, it felt right to draw a 'portrait' of each pen, with the respective pen that I am using, as well as me using the pens.
I wanted to have a really dramatic title for it to reflect my emotions on throwing away stuff I have had for years and the sadness that came with me thinking that I haven't used any of these pens for anything all that great. I used one of my crustiest pens to write ' I am dying', a title that feels like it is about a human, to further anthropomorphize the pens.
On another note, I also collected a lot of plastic over the course of the last couple of months. I mostly saved up fruit and veg nets since I wanted to crochet with them, which I never ended up doing since the nets shed a scary amount of tiny plastic bits whenever I tried to handle them.
I made a n experimental book about single-use plastic. I ironed the food packaging and some other random plastic bag bits I had to some paper. I wanted to use it to comment on the enormous amount of microplastics in the world and how unavoidable they are, to the point that they are also inside us.
Since this book was meant to be a statement on how terrifying the amount of pollutants in the world is, I also felt like I have to use the labels too, instead of throwing them away. I used the nutritional value labels to imply that we are consuming the plastic. More than anything, this ended up being fun typography practice, which I am trying to do more since I am really bad at type.
Process wise, although it was quite tedious (and I definitely got plastic on the communal iron at my flat), I really enjoyed making this book. Working with a medium that refused to be subdued was quite beneficial as it forced me to relinquish control, creating unexpected but nice results.
Last year, I used collage a lot, cutting out really tiny details either digitally or with a scalpel. Looking back, I feel like that made my work feel too stiff, and possibly overworked. I think the plastic book was a great step away from that; letting the materials take control and heavily influenced the outcome created compositions that flow.
When I think of illustrated books I like, 'flow' is definitely a word that comes to mind; when a composition is laid out nicely, I find myself more eager to keep flipping the pages. Looking at ' I talk like a river', by Jordan Scott, illustrated by Sydney Smith: generally, books tend to be landscape, and he takes that into consideration, planning how the whole spread looks; all the actions (walking, swimming) happen from left to right, in compliance with how we read in western Europe. The placement of the text also enhances the reading experience, especially obvious in the 3rd image where the text is used as a frame, surrounding the character the same way the water surrounds him. In his book, 'Drawing for illustration', Martin Salisbury stresses that a picture that feels complete without the text added in is not a great one.
There is a lot to take into consideration when making a picture book, a lot of them being things that I do not really think about early enough in the planning process. For example, looking at my Anorak spread, although there is some space for a title, it doesn't really fit in it, as the space is quite narrow. Generally weirdly shaped type is an unfortunate motif that often comes up in my work because I don't really plan for the text, so I just squeeze it in at the end. This is mostly because I dislike coming up with titles since the titles I come up with make me recoil. I don't really now how to get over this other than to force myself to name everything I make as a form of practice, which is what I have tried to do with 'Single' and 'I am dying...'. I stuck with vague, non-obvious names since I feel like that arouses more curiosity. 'Single' was originally named 'Single Use', but I thought something more ambiguous would be more intriguing.
Some conclusive thoughts on this experimentation are that I enjoyed the unpredictability of the plastic; I plan to explore more materials that make me relinquish some control in the future. Topic wise, although I would like to explore ecological themes and working with thrash more in the future, I feel like the direction the 'I am dying..' book is going in is more relevant for the 'Identity' brief, as I would like to explore something more personal to myself.
' I talk like a river', by Jordan Scott, illustrated by Sydney Smith
The composition of the second spread of my Anorak submission was more considered and does a better job of guiding the eyes through the page, but overall, I think both spreads feel a bit too stiff, mostly because of the way I drew the figures and the linework. I drew everything separately and pieced it together for easy editing later down the line, but I think not drawing the whole spreads as a whole also had downsides as the whole thing feels a bit too pieced-together, rather than a whole composition. Something to think about in the future: balance between making it easy for myself to make changes while not sacrificing flow.
RISK/FAILURE
During this studio session we were asked to spend 2 hours on a piece of work and then destroy it in some way. I wanted to come up with something where the destroying of the work is relevant to the work itself in some way.
I often like to do life drawing when I'm in public spaces like cafes, trains or airports. I've been meaning to try giving some of the stuff I do to the victims of my life drawing, but I've never followed through since I feel like they will think I'm weird or that I want money from them or that they might feel offended with how I've drawn them. I thought that this would be a nice opportunity to try that, since there are still people that I've not talked to on this course, and doing this would be a good opportunity to do so. This is not exactly similar to giving drawings to strangers since, here, I can just say it's part of the workshop and that makes it not be weird (I think), but in a real life setting this would not work, but I think this is still a good start.
I decided to draw the room with everyone in it and I ripped all the people out.
Although I spent some time on it, maybe about am hour, this is not really a good drawing. In landscape pictures, I prefer to focus more on the contrast and perspective, but this image has no perspective whatsoever, linear or cromatic, and the proportions are way off. Additionally, most of the people do not look like themselves. I figured the perspective issue would not be a big deal since I was planning to rip it apart anyway, but the fact that some people were massively misshapen added to my anxiety in sharing the pieces.
I wanted to give everyone theyr own person. I was hesitant to do this with the people with whom I've never talked to but I decided to take the risk and do it even though I felt super embarassed.
The Aftermath
After the practice round of giving people in the class my doodles of them, I decided to take it out into a real world.
I went to a cafe and I was planning to draw an elderly coupe, but since they got up too fats, I was only able to get one of them in. I decided to commit to doing this and I ran after them as they were leaving.
They tried to offer me a coin which I refused. After I gave them the drawing, they also took a picture of me. I am not sure why they did that, but since I also drew them I felt like I had to also let them take a picture of me.
Since I rushed after them I forgot to take a picture, but I drew the interaction on the right. ->
This was a nice interaction, but also really awkward. It makes me feel nice that someone just has some of my artwork, but I feel like depending on the person I do this with, they might feel really weirded out, which I do not want to happen.
I am not sure I will do this again since it made me really nervous.
view from the corner window of room 902 - pre-tutorial pen doodle to clear my mind
I did not know where to go after this. During the peer review there was one specific comment that helped me: "Why do you want to make people sad", which was in regard to my pen book. During this project, I have struggled to interpret identity. This comment made me realise that my experimental books aimed to put one of my real-life experiences on paper. I decided to take that further and think about using the materials and format of a book to make whoever looks at it feel similar to how I did in one moment of my life.
As I was still in the process of exploring materials, I decided to look more through more stuff I bought in first year and never used(like the dots in the pen book). One of the things that I found was a pad of shiny tracing paper that I really wanted to use. I started by saddle stich binding an empty A6 book out of the tracing paper, giving myself plenty of pages to work with.
I thought about using silverfish because of the strong feelings they elicit in people, specifically disgust. In second year, although I rarely saw one, I took them as a bad omen since it felt like I would always see one when I was at my lowest. I often blamed them for my bad mood, although I would've been upset before seeing them and it wasn't really their fault, similar to how they don't do that much damage, but they appear when something is already damaged in a room (leaks, high humidity etc). They are mysterious phantomatic figures that appear and disappear out of thin air.
I had the idea of using tracing paper in a book to build suspense. I thought the tracing paper could be a way to show how the silverfish appear. They are really tiny so they pass as lint, so sometimes it feels like they appear out of nothing. But, way more often, it goes the other way around, where I keep thinking I see one, but it's just a random piece of dust or the tile pattern.
I initially painted huge silverfish on A3 pieces of tracing paper, which I cut up into smaller pages, similarly to 'I am dying...', a habit I picked up on when coming up with ideas, from a 2nd year workshop during an 'Amplify' workshop, where we drew on a big sheet to subsequently turn it into a book.
I juxtaposed the scary close ups with real-scale drawings of silverfish on tiles. I wanted to convey my anxiety of seeing them, although they are rare because they are so small every spec of dust makes me think I saw one, and I've come to associate them with my negative feelings. Since the tracing paper is translucent, I thought the multiple layers of tile could make the silverfish slowly appear into view creating a sense of suspense, to then disappear behind the tile, to mimic the way I always feel like I see them, even though they are not really there (like a ghost). Then, the close ups pop up like a 'jumpscare'. I tried using tracing paper to create an ominous atmosphere by being able to see the vague silhouettes of the bugs peeking through the layered pages.
I then though about contextualising the silverfish images. I decided to split them into chapters, each one focusing on a situation in which I think I see them: in the hair on the floor, in the dark when I open the door, under the hamper and in a random hole in the tile (where I am convinced they live in).
Although, originally, the book was really long because I made it before drawing in it, and I just wanted to fill it up, I think the fact that is this long (about 70 pages) denotes how permeating the fear of seeing a silverfish is, almost becoming obsessive, so, if I decide to explore this further I will probably try to make it of a similar lenght (although I am concerned about printing costs).
Additionally, I think the book being this long could be quite comedic. Something really important to me while making this is that it ends on a positive note especially since the bulk of it is quite a sad topic. The last page of the book is a silverfish squished in a tissue, with the statement 'Dust' above it. Through that, I meant to show that not only can the silverfish be defeated, but also that things can get better if I and whoever is looking at the book stop worrying(at least I hope so). I believe this positive message could be amplified through the book being comically long, sort of like looking back and wondering ' Why was I worrying so much?'; which is also emphasized by the drastic scale change of the silverfish: it seems really big but actually it's just a little thing.
Initially, the idea was quite literal, focusing on portraying the silverfish, as this started out as an exploration of the limits of tracing paper. However, as I was developing the chapters, it evolved more into a representation of the university experience, as well as my anxiety. The silverfish are really small, but similar to how my worries intensify more and more, the longer I avoid facing them, the fear of silverfish is also much bigger than they are in reality. And the repetitive pages of bathroom tiles relay the trails of obsessive thoughts I get into when I am feeling really anxious about something.
As I started thinking more about directions in which I could develop this book, one of the aims also became building community. Being partly about the university accommodation experience ( as it is the physical location of the project), I wanted the book to make people who look at it relate to this part of my identity. I think the tracing paper experiment is a step towards getting better at making work while thinking about the way someone might experience the book; getting the immediate reaction of disgust, then maybe curiosity and hopefully resonation.
To sum up: my main intention was to use the tracing paper to take whoever is reading the book through the experince of the anxiety of encountering silverfish, as opposed to just portraying my own experience.
My next move was to get people to test out the book. Since one of my aims is to build community, this was essential.
The first person I asked to look at it was quite appalled after realising that the creatures inside the book are silverfish, which I thought was a good sign.
When I found a second person to look at it, I decided to observe their reaction more closely. I noticed that they were skipping over a lot of the pages, which is understandable since they are very repetitive. I still wanted to preserve the suspense and ominousness of the book, so I started to think about ways in which I could do that but make it more entertaining.
One of the things that I think I could do is to sprinkle in some some writing across the large expanses of tiles. Whenever I get super anxious, I tend to ask myself a lot of questions over and over again, so I thought something that I could include would be some interrogative pronouns, such as 'What?' or 'Where?' . This could potentially create the impression that something will happen or appear later on throughout the book (which it does not), similarly to how anxiety makes me overthink everything.
I decided to keep a restrained colour scheme, like the one in my original experiment to let the focus be the layering the tracing paper creates. I will only use blue on the tiles to emphasise the 2 different points of view of the story: walking into the room and looking around, and looking at the tiles from up above.
Since there is a lot of repetition going on with the tiles, I wanted to create as much diversity as possible while still keeping them consistent and looking like they are from the same bathroom. To do this, I sourced different textures from my own bathroom floor, which I did by rubbing different colour chalk and wax pastels on top of a thin piece of paper on top of my tile.
I then created a base watercolour rectangle and I made 3 different outlines to digitally mix and match them into different looking tiles.
making the tiles
I also got one of the tiles printed on tracing paper to see what it looks like - I like the way the overlapping textures came out as it feels like they pop out of the page.
Since I have never planned out a book this long, I decided to start quite early.
I think the initial tracing paper experiment book was paced decently. I would like to make it slightly longer, maybe adding one more chapter, since I want to enhance the silliness of it being unreonably long.
To make it more suspenseful, I made the chapters get progressively shorter, the last one being just a couple of pages long before the silverfish gets squashed.
I also spent a lot of time at this stage thinking about printing costs and how to make this in a cost-effective way. I was calculating it based on inkjet tracing paper printing.
I spent a day trying to organise the book in a way in which I could separate the coloured tile from the rest of the pages to be able to print a big part of them on a black and white printer, which would be cheaper. The easiest way to do that would have been to perfect bind the book, specifically single leaf binding. However, after looking through the examples in the book binding room, I realised it would not work very well since perfect bound books tend not to be very secure and they do not lie flat - which I need the book to do so that the layering of tracing paper can be seen. Moreover, perfect-bound books tend to have their pages snap off easily, and since the train paper is shinier than normal paper, they would definitely not stay in.
I also spend some time exploring other methods of single-leaf book binding, such as Japanese binding, which I have done before, and binding with split pins, but both of those would take up a lot of space on the bound edge of a book that is already going to be fairly small.
I also looked into individual stitching, but I think individually stitching this many pages together might take me the whole year.
Planning: lot of maths involved in trying to make this book cost effective; trying to plan out how many pages can fit on a bigger sheet of paper and how small the book has to be to not cripple me financially
After briefly spiralling while planning the book, I decided to talk to a print technician.
The initial tracing paper experiment was done with a really shiny kind of tracing paper, so I needed to test it out before proceeding. I was worried that if I test print it myself, I would break something, so I decided to go do it with a technician, so if something breaks, it's not technically my fault.
This went as badly as it possibly could have, so I am glad I did not do it by myself. The paper got stuck in the depths of the printer and got crumpled up, and had to be forcefully pulled out.
This meant that I had to readjust my plans, since my tracing paper was slightly more opaque than the average tracing paper.
On another note, talking to a technician helped me realise that I was looking into the wrong printing method. I was advised to use laser printing instead of inkjet, since my book is small and can be printed on A3 paper.
Since laser is much cheaper, that meant that I could stop worrying about splitting the book into 2 documents(colour and black and white), since the cost of making the whole thing on a colour printer was no longer an issue. That also meant that I did not have to worry about single-leaf binding the book.
I continued trying to plan out the book, trying to figure out how many pages it should have, and trying to work on the pacing of it. I also started making more mock books to figure out the layering.
I made a few different books, each with very minor changes from the original experiment. I am struggling to decide on how many chapters to include, as well as the order of events.
Since I need to make an InDesign file, I made one of the books as preparation for that, so that I can figure out how big the document should be. I think making these just made me more confused, as they were not really helpful in improving the pacing. Furthermore, they are becoming quite illegible, as they are getting increasingly smaller since I keep running out of tracing paper.
After making myself really confused with the planning, I decided to take a step back and do some experimenting with different mediums to find the best way of representing the silverfish.
drawing drawing drawing silverfish
I spend the next week exploring the silverfish through different materials, particularly thinking about the large close-ups of silverfish parts, which appear at the highest points of emotion in the story.
I created on big pieces of paper, with big movements. I tried using expressive marks that impart an anxious-stressed atmosphere to my drawings. Although I feel like I am perpetually stressed, this week I was fortunately-unfortunately quite relaxed, as I have decided to stick with developing 'Bad Omens' over the course of the 'Identity' brief, at least for the time being, and I also do not have loads of other things going on.
My newly-discovered-at-the-wrong-time relaxed demeanor is particularly obvious in this silverfish lino I made.
Out of everything that I made, it definitely resembles a real silverfish the most; moreover, the lumps and bumps that come with lino make it look appropriately disturbing. As an image I am pretty happy with it. However, I do not think I can use it in the final book since it feels to carefully and patiently drawn, while something more scratchy and quick would fit the tone better.
Something that I have struggled with last year with book-making was letting go of images that I liked but didn't fit in that well, which lead the book to become quite thematically confused. So, telling myself that I do not need and cannot include every image I make is something that I am trying to get better at in this year's outcomes, and the first step towards that is to put the lino to the side.
However, going in the wrong direction with the lino made me realise that I need to be way more spontaneous and expressive with these images. I have also decided to stop looking at pictures of silverfish, since I feel like my trying to represent them faithfully is hindering my ability to be expressive; also, when you see them in real life, they do not look like proper bugs anyways - since they are really tiny, they just look like a shiny elongated teardrop-shaped piece of lint - so a completely accurate representation does not matter that much anyways.
Subsequently, I synthesized the silverfish into a few key parts that make it recognisable as one: the three butt antennae, 6 legs, and long-ish body, which I will keep in mind while creating new drawings.
Thinking back on my plastic book and relinquishing control, I thought mono printing could work well for the book as the textures make it look kind of grimy and it also offers the possibility to create really expressive marks.
The mono worked quite well in creating textures, however, I feel like the silverfish shapes got too out of hand and became very unclear. I also feel like the textures and the linework compete too much, and the silverfish shape gets lost.
Since I liked the mono textures, I decided to cut pieces out and collage them together into some silverfish.
This way, I could preserve the textures and highlight them through the contrast with the blank paper, as opposed to when the mono texture is over the whole page.
Whilst drawing all the silverfish, I remembered a workshop we did in 1st year, when we were told to draw the same animals really small, and then really big. Back then, that made me realise how making the picture different sizes highlights different things about them; the smaller one focuses more on the overall shape, while the bigger one can have more details and a more considered pose.
I tried doing this with the collaged silverfish, making the tiny one first and then taking more time to consider my cut-outs for the bigger one.
This approach has made me consider whether the small and the big close-ups should have more common elements to suggest that they are the same insect. Up until now, I have been drawing them separately, but this made me question whether I should be creating the big and small insects together, with the same techniques.
I also created a silverfish stencil. It was not particularly successful or unsuccessful, but as using stencils has become one of my favourite ways of creating work since our 2nd year stencilling workshop, it was something that I also wanted to try for the silverfish.
Going back to the tiny silverfish, I decided to make some rubber stamps.
I wanted to explore with making tiny swarms of silverfish, since of of my fears is that they will one day all come out into the night and swarm my floor; this could be particularly useful for the 'In the dark' chapter of the book, where a brief image of silverfish covering the bathroom floor appears for a page, before they all disappear like a dream.
To do this, I thought I could make some different rubber stamps and stamp them multiple times to create different groups of silverfish. The top-view silverfish was fairly successful, but when I tried to get some different angles of them, they just ended up looking like lobsters.
The stamps were pretty fun to make but I not think I will be using them for the big groups of silverfish since I cannot make them look different enough without making them look like crustaceans. This also made me realise that the line between a silverfish and crustaceans is very thin.
After what I considered to be a satisfactory amount of silverfish exploration, I decided to briefly step back from it and move on to illustrating some of the chapter sequences.
Initially, since a lot of them are just close ups, I debated just making one of each scene and zooming into it. Since the book is already quite repetitive, I decided to not do that, but to instead just draw out each page. Moreover, I think making the setting look slightly different as I zoom in adds to the dream-like quality of the overall book - kind of like just waking up and being super bleary and woozy and seeing things that are not actually there because of not being fully awake.
Since the book is really long and will probably have to be printed quite small to not be too expensive, while also being on tracing paper, I feel like I should not make the images too detailed. Instead, I decided to create simple pictures, focusing on a main point, like below where the hole is the only really dark part which will be more opaque than everything around it.
Looking at the tile tracing paper test that I got printed, I think a lot of layered textures will look nice on the tracing paper, so I kept the images simple, with the intention to add some mono and paint textures on top, while still keeping only one dark spot to create some interest.
As I have already contemplated stylistic choices throughout the creation of the silverfish, I did not really struggle with this part of the process. I just kept creating rough images that I would piece together in the book later on.
Something that I try to do is maintain a balance between overplanning and underplanning my projects. I often jump into making final pieces without having a good enough grasp on a topic or thinking about who I am making it for. However, I feel like with this project, I did the opposite, where I could have started developing final images earlier, but I was too anxious to do so, due to being worried about committing to this brief, even though it was going well. I feel like, because this is my last year of university, I have been pressuring myself to create outcomes that fully represent what I want to do later on, career-wise (while simultaneously discovering what I want to do career-wise, since I do not know).
My aforementioned tiny mock-books are a reflection of this uncertainty, as I just kept re-making them and second-guessing everything I have done until now.
I think I just have to reassure myself that what I do now does not have to define me forever; and to keep going.
Surrealism - Un Chien Andalou
When I used to study fine art, I used to be really inspired by surrealist painters due to the fact that I found the way they managed to portray dreams fascinating.
This fascination has bleed into my illustration practice; while developing this book a reacurring influence has been Salvador Dali's movie "un chien andalou". The movie, which is based on the creators' actual dreams, abruptly cuts between logically incongruous shots, adhereing to its own dream logic.
I wanted to portray a similar dream-like sequence of events in this book to portray the way fear and anxiety make me feel.
After working on this project for quite a while, I got a bit bored of it. I decided to take the time to consider some other directions the idea of 'Bad Omens' can go.
Potentially, I could make a series of smaller zines that explore the 'Bad omens' of everyday life. I could explore anxiety by taking the brief out of my bathroom and into other places of my home, such as in the space between my bed and the wall.
I also want to explore creating more 3D work this year. Something that I am particularly interested in is ceramics. Since this book takes place in a bathroom, I feel like implementing the materiality of ceramics or tile could be interesting. As I decided to take into account the fact that I might want to do ceramics for this project later in the year, I decided to sign up for an induction.
I did not come equipped with ideas when I went into the induction, so I just started by making some silverfish sculptures. To make the most of the induction, I tried using as many textures as possible to see what works, both stamping them on and adding them overtop. I also learned how to use a mould. I expected the big bug to crack in the kiln since it did not seem very structurally sound, and I was pleasantly surprised when it did not.
As I started making some smaller silverfish out of clay, I realised that by squeezing it in my hand, I could form something akin to the ridges of silverfish; squeezing the clay brought about the theme of anxiety, through using the silverfish as a stress-ball of sorts. Thinking back on my rubber-stamped swarms of silverfish, If I were to develop a 3D outcome, I could make a lot of these tiny ceramic silverfish and sprinkle them around places.
Returning to the project
After the 5 weeks ended, I took a step back from the project as I was pretty confident in the direction it was going. Coming back, I felt like I could more confidently return to planning out the book.
I made one last set of thumbnails and decided to reduce it by a lot, bringing it to about the same size as the first experiment.
To improve the pacing, I only kept the first 'chapter' fairly long, with a lot of the repeated tile pages. The chapters then shrink more abruptly, to hopefully build a sense of anticipation. Although the tiles are repeated between all of the 'chapters', they do so in much shorter sequences, since the mystery of the silverfish amongst the tiles is already revealed in the first part.
Furthermore, now that I was aware that the tracing paper I need to use is much less opaque than originally intended, I spent some time tried to plan what sides of the paper I will print stuff on, trying to avoid putting images on both sides of the paper so that they do not overlap too much and become muddy, and trying to leave plenty of pages blank to maintain the haziness from the original experiment.
I proceeded to finalise all the images, and to place them in an indesign file.
Since the book is quite tiny (A6) it would be very wasteful to print a singular spread on a whole sheet of paper, so, the next step was to lay all the pages out in a secondary document, where they would be formatted on larger pieces of paper that I could print.
As I started laying them all out, I was not feeling absolutely confident that I am doing this in a way that will print right. As I discovered earlier on in the project, it saves me a lot of time if I just ask for some advice instead of wasting time struggling on my own, only to still need help afterwards.
Getting support from Gary from print support was very eye-opening, as he showed me how to create signatures in the book, something that I had previously not considered doing. This would make the book lie down flatter, which was an issue in my mock-ups that I did not, at that time, know how to address, but that I could now fix. Getting Gary's help was not only useful in the making of this indesign file, but it vastly expanded my overall knowledge of the programme.
Seeing the whole file made me feel quite scared, as it looks very sparse. I had to remind myself that this was all done on purpose to achieve a (hopefully) optimal layering effect, without the lines overlapping eachother in places they shouldn't.
Before sending it off to print, I did one last precautionary test on printer paper, to see if everything lined up, which it did!
I initially printed out only one book, but since I was not sure about the exact method to use, I decided to print some more so that I could try a couple different ways.
I also realised that since I printed the title out on one of the pages instead of as a separate cover(which I did not realise in the transition from saddle stitch to signatures) I would need a different cover to envelop all the signatures.
Initially, I was planning to just use tracing paper, but I decided to try out a plastic or acetate cover to make the books more sturdy. I cut and folded them out as I would a paper soft cover, with a space to put the glue in.
I picked out different clear materials, but the thicker ones kept snapping when I scoring and folding them , so I ended up using acetate for all of the books
I tried out different methods of binding the books, but the basis of it was making a text block out of all the pages using coptic stitching, which implies sewing all the pages of the signature, while simultaneously uniting them with other signatures. I struggled quite a lot during this part, since tracing paper is quite brittle and kept wanting to snap when I was pushing the needle through.
Although I made a lot of mock ups over the course of this project, this made me realise I should have also made one using the exact materials and stitching technique I was planning for the final book. Perhaps if I had done that, I would have been more prepared tackling the issues that arose during this stage.
I also encountered problems when gluing the text block into the cover, as neither tracing paper or acetate are known for being grippy. I used multiple types of glue, but superglue worked best. I also sanded it down to add some grip, and tried adding strips if more tracing paper between the cover and textblock. Aditionally, I also tried using staples instead of stitching with the hope that they will hold better ( they did not). I also tried cropping the books both before and after adding the covers, since I was worried about the plastic snapping, to see which method worked best. I think making the whole thing and cropping it at the end with the cover would have been the best method for all of them, but I had to to try all options before realising that.
In the end, throwing everything I had at the books made the spines really messy looking. To solve that, I decided to cover the spines in silver leaf. The silver leaf covers up the messy spine, while also adding a bathroom-like shininess to the book, kind of like a mirror.
My first silver leaf attempt did not come out right because I neglected to read the instructions, which I will definitely start doing in the future. However, I feel like the way the leaf spit makes it look similar to silverfish scales, so it was not a totally bad accident.
I also sold a couple of the books!
Some highlights of the final book
Looking at the tiny bound books, there are many things that I like about them.
When I first planned this book, I used a kind of tracing paper that cannot be easily printed, so, in the final books, the effect is quite different due to changing the paper. I think the more transparent paper is nice, since more of the layers can be seen at once, but it also makes some of the spreads quite busy.
Moreover, I like the small size of the book, as it is a reminder that the silverfish are just tiny creatures, no matter how scary they might seem. But, I have had numerous people look at the book to observe how they interact with it, and I feel that the really small size makes them kind of just flip through it really fast. One of the main points of having lots of pages to flip through was to create suspense, which often did not come through when I made people test it out. I also sold some copies of the book at the symposium, and I noticed that one of the people who got one were looking through it more slowly and observing every page(which makes sense since they actually spent money on it), but I still think it is worth reconsidering the format to take into consideration the way people flip through the book, and finding different ways to guide their experience.
An easy way to do this would be to make it bigger, which I plan to do, but I thiink I can go so much further.
I would also still consider these tiny books to be final outcomes, although imperfect, so although I plan to remake the book, I want to change it quite a bit so that I can get more out of this project by exploring different formats. Moreover, I feel like as the year passed, my understanding of bookmaking has deepened, so I would like my final-final outcome to reflect that.
Initially, I was also thinking of printing with white ink on the tracing paper to tackle some of the issues I have had with the opacity(since I have not attempted white ink printing in the past year and it is something I want to try again), but I have realised that it will have the same effect and be easier and safer(as in I won't fuck it up) to just integrate opaque paper into my book.
In the original plan, I rely mostly on obsessive repetition and scale to translate anxiety, but I believe there are many different ways to double down on that; whilst maybe removing a lot of the repetitive pages out, since I feel like the people who look at it flip through them quickly which defeats the point of having them in to build suspense.
One of my lecturers reccommended I read a book called "House of Leaves", which is a story within a story, an as well as an epistolary novel (meaning told through letters/notes), and exploits the book format to the max, with unconventional formatting of the text that makes the reader turn the book or hold it to a mirror.
Notably, I would like to quote what my lecturer said about the book: " It's really scary. Don't read it."
Putting his advice aside, what I really want to build for this project is something that ellicits such a reaction. This is probably a really overly-ambitious thought considering my skill level, as well as the time I have left to work on this project; but I think this project could, at least, serve as a trial for doing this in the future, maybe even as a job. But for now I will just do my best.
I also started looking at book-objects, specifically less type-based ones, thinking about how I could format the book to add another layer of interaction. I am considering something to make the book look more bathroom-like, such as a shiny mirror-like material, or perhaps something akin to bathroom tiles. I feel like including a physically heavy element would amplify the heaviness of anxiety, so tile might be a good idea to try; however, I am not sure how I would include it in the book; perhaps it could be a separate outcome? Or, like in the examples above, perhaps the book could come enclosed in some kind of packaging.
Re-returning to this project
It is now the beginning of the last term. As I got busier, I left this project on the back burner of my mind, as I was not too worried about it.
I had decided since last term that I would be reprinting the book. Something that I am worried about is re-planning the layout, but it has to be done since printing the book as it is right now, but bigger would cost me quite a lot. Moreover, although I enjoyed experimenting with tracing paper and I liked the concept of a book made entirely of it, it has caused numerous problems. For once, it is difficult to print with, and it tends to leave a lot of ghosts. It is also difficult to plan around since the pages need to lie in a really specific way. I've also had the displeasure of finding out that tracing paper differs a fair bit between batches, so the opacity is kind of impossible to control. It is also quite stiff, so it wants to split during binding. All in all, even though re-planning the book might take a bit of time, I feel like it is a good opportunity to address all the issues I have had with my tiny books.
Since the end is approaching, I want to use this book to try out some things that I have not had the chance to explore much.
One of these is creating bio materials. I tried this out waaaaay back, in term one, but, at that point, I didn't really see a way in which I could integrate it into my work.
Seeing that I had some issues finding a material that would look nice as the cover, I decided that a fun thing to do would be to create my own material.
I decided to go with a carrageenan-based plastic( which I have also made during the induction), because I do not want to work with gelatin, and because it comes out clearer. Since I needed the cover to be bendy, I adjusted the ratio and added 75% more glycerin into the recipe to make it more elastic.
I mixed up the algae goo and left it in the fridge to soak. I am really bad at measuring, and I definitely messed up the water by quite a large margin, but I am hoping this will still work out. Since I do not have time to source my own tub of carrageenan, I can only make this one piece, so I am a little bit nervous about how it will turn out.
Since I am able to create my own material, I want to get creative with the add-ons. I want the plastic to look like it has pieces of bugs inside of it, to add to the horrifying effect of the book. I briefly considered using actual silverfish corpses, but I could not bring myself to. I also am not sure if it is allowed.
I decided on a combo of brown tea, silver leaf and activated charcoal to create the effect of bugs. In my mind, the tea could look like tiny squished legs, while the silver leaf and charcoal would look like tiny silverfish scales. I feel like the shiny silver would also make the book have more of a bathroom feel due to the shine. Last moment, I decided to add some cut-up pieces of black string that I found, which could either look like antennae or like hair.
I added all the ingredients and boiled them, and then I sprinkled charcoal on top. The think I should have added less tea and string since the material looks a bit too busy. It also looks less like bug parts, and more like a dirty, hairy floor, but I like the grimey feel of it.
Making this material, I started to wonder if the book will be too gross. While I want it to be scary and disturbing, I still want people to pick it up and be interested in it, but will my audience be too grossed out? What is the limit? What is too gross?
On that same note, after submitting this dissertation, I was too tired to get on with my work, so I decided to do something fun. Something that I have been meaning to try is making paper. I did not think that I would have the time to, but I decided to try it out since I did not have the energy for anything too complicated today.
Initially, I wanted to make some plant fibre paper to use in the book, like grass or pineapple, but since that takes longer and is also more brittle, I went for recycled paper.
Looking back at the brief: ' How can the choice of medium and material
tell a story about who we are or where we come from? Can identity be embedded within the physical
properties of the materials themselves—through texture, form, or process?'
tell a story about who we are or where we come from? Can identity be embedded within the physical
properties of the materials themselves—through texture, form, or process?'
With that in mind, when I started making the paper, I chose to use random leftover uni work from the past 2 years: 'meet me in the emiddle' rejected risos, scraps of fabric from 1st year book cover, paper for the LUV It book and many more. While this was definitely not the most sophisticated way to interpret this theme, it was quite fun.
Although I have the bio-plastic to use as a book cover, I would like to make some further experiments. Something that I wanted to explore with the silverfish book was tiles. I thought a ways to integrate that could be to make a tile book cover.
Although I think the heaviness would aid in doubling down on the anxiety theme the book tackles, a normal tile might be too heavy, so I decided to explore different materials that I could create a tile out of.
My first experiment did not go very well, but that was expected since I have not worked with much plaster before.
I made a frame out of a picture frame I dismantled a while ago. I tried out putting different textures on the bottom to see what happens - tape, shiny paper and sandpaper. I also made a texture akin to the one on my own bathroom tiles with hot glue. Th eplaster was definitely too thick, which is something to b=remember in the future, but I think the glue texture imprinted really well. I also like all the textures separately, but I think the lines they make when they are all together look a bt weird, so my next iterations will definitely consist of only one.
I re-made the tile, creating a space for it to become a tile-box.
This time, the plaster had too much water in it, so it did not dry properly and ended up cracking. I also realised that it would be bulkier than I thought. Since it was causing so many issues, I decided to put a stop to the development of this idea, since it was not working out as smoothly as I had hoped.
Moreover, aI feel like since this is the last outcome I will have time to make this year, I have been shoving too many ideas and things to try into it. Since this element is not necessary for the book to exist, it is the best thing to stop doing, to give me time to do other things better.
I then decided to get right into the planning of this next iteration of the book. Over the course of the year I realised that I tend to plan books out more efficiently if I get right to it and make test books, rather than planning it out on a flat piece of paper. Planning out the pages on flat paper in the initial stages makes me overthink everything too much, and the wide expanse of a plain piece of paper intimidate me and makes me stall. If I get right into making mock-books I can start planning everything within the format that it will be in. Moreover, when I draw my plans, there tend to be a lot of confusing scribbles and arrows as I change my mind, but in a mock-book I can change all the spreads around until I glue it all together.
I decided to start small, thinking about all the elements that I want to keep, such as the tile and the close ups, which have always sat at the core of the project.
I also want to focus more on the actual space in this iteration - the bathroom, which I find does not come across as important enough in Bad Omens1; the book happens there, but the space is quite fragmented ( 'in hair' shows the mirror, 'under' shows the hamper, 'in the wall' shows the weird hole in my wall). I think this makes the bathroom not feel like a space in its own right, which was is an important aspect, since I made this book thinking about the moments where anxiety permeates my being, even when I am in my home which should be a comfortable space.
Over the course of this year, I have also become really interested in using cut-outs in books, which I think could be used here to show fragments of the silverfish on a different level, other than just the tracing paper. With this in mind I think that I think I could focus more on the hole in my tile in this iteration.
Additionally, I think turning this concept into more of a narrative has the potential to make it more ominous, as well as more engaging, since I feel like a narrative will always be easier to follow than abruptly cutting to different shots. It would be a really loose and simple narrative showing my routine: opening the door and turning the light on, looking for bugs on the floor while still being half awake.
I also conjured the idea to use pop up elements to make the book scarier.
I made this cube room. Since it is late in the year I made the cube as simple as it can be while still standing up.
The first bad omens book, although meant to be ominous, is meant to have some level of silliness to it through the obsessive repetition which becomes comedic through its absurdity. Since this book is way shorter, and the tile is not repeated nearly as much, I thought the pop up element could bring back a level of quirkyness to it, taking the person reading out of the bathroom and establishing that the events in the book are not real, just like the silverfish is not actually that big. I made a hole in the cube room, in the same place the hole in my tile is, with a tiny silverfish inside the room; reversing the roles of person and silverfish for one page - in the end we are all scared of eachother.
The funny aspect of the book is amplified later on in the book as well, by showing the real size of the silverfish instead of the zoomed in one.
my first attempt at making the cube
I browsed this book for patterns, until I found a cube that could be turned into a room.
I also decided to add a pop up element in the form of the door. As I mentioned, I want this to be a vague narrative, starting with someone opening a door to a bathroom. I was worried that , like 'In the dark' chapter of the first book, the fact that it shows a person slowly opening the door to a bathroom gets lost, so making it into a pop up element felt like it would drive the point home more effectively.
Whenever I make a book, I like for them to have symmetrical elements, so having the door in the beginning and the room in the middle-ish, makes me feel prompted to add a 3rd pop up element at the end, potentially of a silverfish closeup, if I can figure out a way of creating one that doesn't look really bad.
I have previously stated that I want the project to end on a positive, hopeful note - the silverfish being squashed along with the fear of them - but I no longer feel that way. It is the end of the year and I am still quite uncertain and anxious, so I think it is more appropriate to end the book turning it back to the scary silverfish closeup. Doing this makes the book feel more cyclical, showing that while uncertainty/anxiety can get better or worse as time passes, they are parts of life that will not just disappear.
I think this final element has the potential to have a stronger impact if it is another pop-up.
In the mock book above, I used a folded piece of paper as a placeholder for the silverfish, since I could not come up with something that isn't overly silly in the moment.
There are ways to create pop-up elements that are scary, for example, the way they are used in the Babadook pop-up book, where the children's book appearance makes the spreads more disturbing. I also looked at this book due to the fact that, although full of really intricate pop-up elements, it also has quite a few simple ones, such as the bottom right image. I think this late in the year, it is important to look at things that I can attain with my skill-level, instead of trying to pick up something new.
Initially, I wanted to go for a more 3d, tubular, silverfish design, so I used a pattermn for a 5-sided tube. However, it was taking too long to create one of them. Knowing that I have to make a pattern multiple times to get the hang of it, I decided to stick with a simpler, V-shaped design.
I referred back to the Duncan Birmingham book, and tried out making the base pattern.
After that, I tried making the shape more bug-like. At this point, I felt like it looked pretty stupid, but I decided to persist.
I decided to embrace the fact that it looks quite funny. The book was always meant to have a funny angle to it, perhaps now more evident than originally intended. Since I tried to make the book quite ominous, I feel like a relatively silly pop-up at the end could potentially be effective in breaking away of ending the book by breaking the tension.
I continued creating the pop-up books. I drew the pattern out and then used tracing paper to cut it out, to be able to test it a couple more times to figure out where to add all the elements of a bathroom. I also prepared a tiny silverfish to be inserted into the room.
I decided to use tracing paper for the room, since I felt like using normal paper made the structure look too much like a random cube, but I wanted it to be able to be read as a bathroom without looking through the hole. This caused some structural issues since tracing paper is very flimsy, which I attempted to fix by layering the tracing paper in places where it struggled to keep straight.
I tend to struggle with taking into account the potential longevity of my projects. Will this look good if it is constantly opened and closed for a month? Maybe not. How my work will endure the test of time is something that I am trying to consider more, especially this year. However, when I get caught up in small details, I tend to forget that books are objects which tend to be handled a fair bit.
Comparatively, I think the silverfish pop-up is more sturdy. I used thicker paper and and I kept the design as simple as possible.
planning - note that TP refers to tracing paper, and N to non-tracing paper
With the pages pretty much decided on, I set out to plan the layout of the book. Since I want to include tracing paper and normal paper, as well as pop-up elements (which cannot be sewn in easily), this will have to be a bit of an unusual layout. Luckily, a couple months ago Gary from print support imparted the knowledge of making signatures onto me, so I was not worried.
I sketched all my spread out, and noted which ones I absolutely want to be tracing paper, and which ones I want to be opaque paper. After assessing the situation, I found that the best way to split them up would be in 2-sheet (which is 8 pages) signatures. Although this means that the signatures will be quite unusually thin, this is the easiest way for me to mix the 2 kinds of paper. Moreover, with this layout, I can leave space to glue the pop up pages between the signatures, so I do not have to worry about finding a way to stitch them in.
Something else that I have been meaning to get into this year was intaglio printmaking, specifically drypoint and collagraph. I feel like these 2 techniques could work for this book through the wide array of textures that I can create. Drypoint also implies scratching into metal or plastic, and I feel like the scratchiness would boost the state of anxiety portrayed in the book.
My attempts at drypoint were relatively straightforward, and even though my hand slipped a couple times, I think it went pretty well.
However, doing collagraph was much more difficult for me, as I relied to much on fine lines that did not come through the varnish, instead of on the contrast between textures.
One of the things that I have been slipping in more in this version was human silhouettes/ reflections in the mirror, kind of like the 'in hair' one. This was because I wanted the fact that the bad omen is an insect not to be clear instantly, while also suggesting the fact that it is not the insect that is the problem, but the person's state of mind.
Following a tutorial discussion about pacing, I decided to make some more changes to the illustrations. Thinking about how scary movies are paced, Jordan Peele's 2022 movie 'Nope' came to mind, specifically how I felt while watching it. While I was seeing it, I remember thinking it was one of the most suspenseful movies I had watched. However, after the form of the alien is revealed (while the movie is still really awesome), I felt the sense of suspense completely break. That is the case for a lot of horror movies, but for this one, I felt that the difference in how I felt before and after the reveal was especially drastic. (maybe because it's one of the only horror movies I watched on a big screen.)
With that in mind, to further emphasise what I mentioned above, instead of starting the book with the close-up of the insect, I used a shadow of it, not to instantly reveal what it exactly is.
'Nope' alien
I tried doing letterpress in the bio material. Since I had a tiny spare sheet of a similar material from my induction, I used that one (green one) as a test. It worked really well, but when I went on to print on the cover, it did not go nearly as well, probably because the cover was a lot rougher. I then tried to paint over it, which looked even worse. In the end, the only thing I could do was to turn it to the back and scrub it off with water. It did not fully go away, but it was the best I could do.
A lot went wrong during the printing and binding process.
Since I know that tracing paper tends to cause a lot of issue, I decided to send 2 copies to print. This way I could also have two copies to bind in different ways, in case I want to use something other than the weird bio-material. I went to talk to the print team to consult them about my paper. They said it is a bit thin, so they said they would test one of the pieces of paper out to see if it gets really wrinkled. However, after I came back they just printed out both of my copies, and they were quite badly wrinkled, and some of the spreads were on the wrong kind of paper since the paper. Since I sent this to print quite late already, I knew I had no time to re-print it. Luckily, since I had 2 copies, I could at least pick out the best spread from each one and merge them into a half-decent book.
I then proceeded to stitch them into book block. I stitched my signatures at the same time as I stitched them to each other. I tend to attempt a lot of stuff for the first time in my final outcomes, which does not always go well. I was initially planning to do that for the stitching of this book, but since I was too tired to do some practice rounds of a new stitch, I repressed the urge to. I instead went with my go-to method, which I have used for every case bound book I made this year.
Looking back, I wish I used more diverse stitching methods in the 6 mini-books I initially made for this project. Although they are technically bound in different ways, those differences where quite slight, as I mostly just tried different ways of sticking them to the cover.
I feel like I should have tried harder to expand my horizons in the beginning of the year, when I still had time to mess up. If I had done that, I would have had a larger repertoire of stitches and binding methods that I could have picked from and been confident in doing.
I initially bound this book using a hard cover made out of plastic. This was not looking good since the beginning, since the material was really difficult to glue, and it ended looking really messy. The edges could also be seen through the plastic. I also messed it up even more after this, as I needed to stick end pages to the cover to secure the pages to it, which ended up going really wrinkly due to the glue. (I was too embarrassed to take a picture)
I had to make the decision to rip it off and redo it, even though I was on a time crunch, and I had other things to do , I would have regretted it even more if I had left it like this.
Luckily, the print technicians were able to help me a lot, and UV printed a book cover for me, which looked much more neat. I also left the skin flap hang open, since I did not want to make the same mistakes twice, especially when I was really tired.
FINAL THOUGHTS
This has been, by far , my most linear project this year, so I have a lot to take away from the successes of this project. Most of all, I think the reason why this went so smoothly is because I managed my time well during the beginning of the project, giving myself plenty of time for mess-ups or for changing my mind, while also keeping organised. Unfortunately, I did not keep that up over the course of the entire project, hence, some major mess ups occurred, which I would have never been able to fix without help from the print team.
In the end, I am happy I put in the effort of re-doing the book, especially since I got to try working with bio materials, which I have been interested in doing for the whole year, but never got the chance to.
In first and even second year, finishing a project and then re-doing it would have been my worst nightmare so I feel quite accomplished thinking about how I was able to come back to this first project of the year and to improve it.
I also think I need to respect my limits better, since, while I was creating this second iteration, I could feel that my sleep deprived brain was making questionable choices, and yet I did not stop myself from continuing, which ended quite badly.
Overall, I am happy I could end the academic year with this being the last thing I have made.
