A Book Project - Part One

Today I’m going to talk about how I made my BA project which is basically the design of a book complete with illustrations made also by myself. Maybe this can help anyone interested in making a book for themselves, for art school or otherwise. There’s room for another article here, a more “how to” simplified one, but for now I’ll just recount my personal experience with this project. 

So the concept was making a book out of books - meaning drawing my illustrations inside old books from the house bookcase, then scanning them and reprinting them inside this new baby, the brand new book.

The concept came naturally through a sort of homework assignment chosen by our professor for the summer: choosing an old ragged book and making it into a book object, personalizing it in our own way. I chose this small volume of poetry (above), with Romanian historical legends, and started with collage but it quickly evolved to just drawing with my black Artist pen from Faber Castell. I started drawing what I saw, mainly things from the house, the cat, my shoes etc., but also stuff from memory like faces of people, mostly made up from seeing A LOT of people on my daily long bus ride to school.

So I started a new book, after reading it this time, the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In search of lost Time, Swann, and after more people gave positive reviews of the idea of reusing old books, I decided to make my diploma out of it. The concept of reprinting the illustrations onto something new had been suggested to me a while ago by my class teacher and it stuck with me so I went with that.

The plan was to fill 5 total books with drawing and collage interventions, to make them my own, and display them along with the new book and some framed prints of the spreads on the wall.

So came the idea to switch it up a bit so as to avoid getting stuck in a rut and repeating myself, so I tried 3 other books, technical ones this time, because since my parents were trained to be engineers I had them in my house. These were slightly bigger and more challenging to fill. I tried more collage, even collage from scanning my old notebooks or journal and using those black and white prints. By the 5^th book I was sort of sick of it all and had already started arranging the soon-to-be print in InDesign so it was done in a hurry and probably the visually weakest of the bunch. 

The 4^th volume had lots of carefully drawn illustrations of my surroundings with some lettering in it. Lettering was a big part of this project, I love to write and to pay attention to how the letters look as a drawing. I wrote lyrics of the songs I was listening to, like from Bee Gees or The Cure, or Alexandru Andrieş, quotes of stuff that was in my head or just some thoughts. This added to the diary-like dimension of the project.

I almost forgot about the 3^rd and middle book in this project! A medium size math exercise book, it was filled with more abstract decorative shapes, using a paintbrush and ink this time as opposed to the delicate marker I had used so far. The only inspiration I can account for here is the painting exhibition of some Australian natives I had seen at Sky Tower in Bucharest a few months before – it’s funny how our subconscious just spouts out these things sometimes, isn’t it?

Since this got a little long I made a part two to talk more about the process of making an artist book from scratch.