Month: October 2006

Book Arts Class

Karen


Skylar and Sloan

It’s four a.m., and I can’t sleep. It’s very dark and still except for the glow of the monitor and the hum of the CPU fan. Today will be my third consecutive day staying home from school. I have a nasty cold. It started with a sore throat and cough last week. I tried to fight it off by drinking lots of water and basically willing it to go away, but the cold had more tenacity than I did. By the end of school on Monday, I could barely talk. So I decided to just stay home and take care of myself. It’s hard to be in front of 130 twelve year olds when you feel lousy. And then I have the added joy of having to oh-so-discreetly cross my legs everytime I cough. It’s not a pretty sight. My husband hates it when I’m sick. Yesterday he said that if I would just think positive and act like I feel healthy, then I would be okay. So it’s all in my head, eh? Bring me a kleenex and leave me alone.

I’m not very good at lying around the house and doing nothing for the sake of getting better. So yesterday I scheduled some more ebay auctions for my gothic fairy collages. I’ve sold three so far but am in a quandry about how many times to list a piece before removing it from circulation. I don’t feel like giving up just because a collage hasn’t found a home yet. I know there’s somebody for each one of my small blessings; they just have to find their rightful owner. Maybe I’ll pull them after listing them three times and put them on the collage art page on my web site and try to sell them there.

Later on in the day I made some little sample books for the Book Arts class that I will start teaching on Monday after school. I have ten young ladies signed up for the class, and I’m very excited about making books with them.

For the first class I’m going to show a powerpoint presentation of some incredible artist books so they can get an idea of the unlimited possibilities for creating artist books. Many of the images I used are from the Guild of Book Workers’ 100th Anniversary Exhibition. You should really take a look at this site when you have some time to kill; the variety of artistic vision is breathtaking.

Next we’re going to make some 3″ X 4″ books that are folded from a single sheet of 8 1/2″ X 11″ paper. I got the recipes from Shereen LaPlantz’s great book Cover-to-Cover. I’m going to have lots of colored paper for them to use. I thought this would be a good way to introduce them to different types of folds, how to use a bone folder for scoring and creating nice tight creases (we’re going to use old credit cards as cheap imitation bone folders), and how to safely use an exacto blade for cutting.

I wanted them to make a little box in which they could put their finished books, and I found this neat Super Deluxe Tuckbox Template Maker where you can enter the dimensions of the box you want to create and it will make a custom template that you can print out on your computer. (The calculations on the template maker are a little off, so if you do this be sure to add .25 to all your dimensions, otherwise it will come out too small.) I printed my template on cardstock and made a cute little tuckbox for the books to fit in. I think the girls are really going to enjoy this.

I also plan on showing them my texture box so they can start collecting textures of their own since the next class will be all about decorating paper. I’m going to show them how to make a string stamp as their homework assignment. Hopefully at the next class we’ll have ten very cool string stamps that we can use to decorate our paper. I can’t wait!

My Gothic Fairies

Karen


Jeran and Nemanda

So I had an itch in my brain that I had to scratch. I wanted to make some collages. I had seen a lot of altered cabinet cards in the artsy, craftsy magazines lately, and I thought to myself, “That looks like fun.” But I didn’t want to do what they had all done. I wanted my altered images to be a little different, a little strange. I played around with some scans in Photoshop, and viola!, I created some strange little people to use in my art. I wanted fairies, but not too pretty. Gothic fairies. Gothic fairies with insect wings. A little dark around the edges. A little mysterious. Little gothic fairy children who befriend gargoyles.

After I had made a few, I showed them to my sister. She does not like them at all. She said, “What do you think is causing you to make all this weird art lately?” Just my mood, I guess. But I have fallen in love with these little people. I give them a name. I give them a teeny bit of history, and then I set them free on eBay, and watch what happens (or doesn’t, as the case may be.) It’s all okay. I know that someone out there is going to look at Jaren and Nemanda, or Mizzy, Flora, and Little Vell (my favorites so far) and love them as much as I do.

I wanted my auction to look just right, so I wanted to make my own background and html formatting. I looked around at some of the free ebay selling assistants and decided on Auctiva. I felt like I had to learn something new all over again. So I spent about three sleepness nights emailing customer support, asking questions on the forums, tweaking and untweaking my template until it was just (almost) the way I wanted it. I spent ONE WHOLE DAY just trying to figure out how to get the background image I wanted to show up. And then when I finally figured it out, of course it was something so tiny and simple that I almost broke down and cried when I discovered it. Isn’t that just the way with the web? It can suck the life out of you and can almost make you break down and cry.


Mizzy, Flora, and Little Vell