The Brief:

First Thoughts

My first thoughts around this assignment is that it was well and truly out of my comfort zone! When I first started my course I used to do everything by hand and tried to shy away from digital as much as possible and now I was finding myself trying to shy away from practical and hide back behind digital design! I like the mixed media aspect, I like experimenting with different textures and techniques and seeing what can happen but I did feel stumped behind the fact that I was altering a small book with existing pages and I felt that there was very limited possibilities! When I first looked into altered books all I saw were a lot of books with the pages cut and moulded to create a shape – the books were not really usable or readable, they were just created like that to be aesthetically pleasing and for decorative purposes. There is a book in our sixth form Centre at work that has been made just like this and just sits on the side to welcome visitors:

This type of book is very clever but I knew I did not want to create this, I knew that I still wanted the book I altered to be engaging; I still wanted people to be able to read it and look at the pages. This is where when I did my research further I had to be sure that I was altering a book and not creating an artists journal which I struggled to distinguish between at the beginning!

I did approach this brief with a certain amount of resistance and reservation – the fear of taking a whole, perfectly bound book and then completely ripping it apart and changing it worried me! It was like making that first move with a paintbrush stroke on a blank canvas!

Research

For me this assignment was a little bit different from all the rest I have done. Usually, I research into what the brief is asking and then come up with design ideas to then take forward and design and make. This seemed different though because it is already a book that has been made. I found the idea of designing pages for it difficult because the pages already had content on them! Instead I researched more into front cover designs and mixed media. I knew that however I made this altered book it would include the use of mixed media.

I also did my usual process of looking at Pinterest for ideas on what an altered book was! Some of the examples I found though were a fine line between an altered book and an artists journal book. Out of the 2 I preferred the artists book as there seemed more scope for creativity!

I also found some examples of altered/artists books on Facebook from an artist based near me:

I first needed to figure out what book I wanted to design for. I had a few options in my head… The Secret Garden, Little Women, My Story by Marilyn Monroe… I wanted to ideally alter a book that meant something to me though and had value to me growing up or from the time I read it. Charlottes Web then seemed like an obvious choice as it was a book that was read to me when I was 9 years old at school and which eventually helped contribute to me being a Vegetarian later on in my life.

I had a copy of Charlottes Web already, it was the copy my Mum and Dad bought me for Christmas straight after our classroom teacher finished reading it to us at school, I wanted my own copy so that I could reread it by myself.

I didn’t fancy ripping this copy to bits for my altered book though, so I continued to browse online.

I found another one on Amazon that seemed nice; the cover was beautifully illustrated and I thought I could do something with this copy for definite! I ordered it and it arrived but it just wasn’t what I was expecting! It was smaller than I imagined, much smaller than my original copy of Charlottes Web, I struggled to see how I could create something great with the copy I now had in my hands.. plus a few days after ordering this copy I instantly regretted it after watching a foiling video on YouTube. I like the really classic looking hardback books that have the beautiful gold lettering on the front and only after watching this video online, did I realise that I could potentially achieve that using a pyrography pen which is something I own! I needed a copy of Charlottes Web with a dust cover and a lovely blank canvas underneath it!…

This is the copy I found on Ebay with a dust jacket and a red hardback cover underneath…

When it arrived, again, I don’t know what I was realistically expecting because every copy I’ve bought looks quite small! I think in my head I was after a chunky, big ish sized book!

I immediately tore off the dust jacket and observed what the hardback cover was like.. perfect! As well as knowing that I wanted to do the gold foiling on the cover I also knew that I wanted to try out a very natural mixed media technique that I found whilst randomly scrolling through Facebook! There is a group on there that I follow called “Home for peculiar artists” and this technique I found was definitely that! I stumbled across it a few weeks before I even started Charlottes Web and at the time I thought to myself whoever would ever sit down and think to do that!.. strangely it intrigued me though so I carried on reading. At the time though I wasn’t even sure if it was cruel to some extent.. having done my research before I carried it out myself it seemed absolutely fine. This weird technique that I found was capturing real spider webs and preserving them forever as art!

Obviously I needed help for this… I think spiders are very fascinating clever little creatures but I do not want one anywhere near me! I enlisted the help of my Fiance who just looked at me like I was insane when I told him I wanted to spray some cobwebs gold and capture them onto my book cover!

We did a few trials first to get the hang of it.. feeling mean for stealing spiders webs we obviously made sure that no spiders were near and we also researched that spiders over night create new webs in no time whatsoever so off we went to work!

There were a few webs in the windows which Chris did not like the idea of spraying until I assured him that the paint I was using could be washed off with some Elbow grease!! One of the trial pieces we did went really well but the other 2 collapsed with the pressure of the spray from the spray mount and spray paint.

I could use all of these in my altered book though! Nothing was a waste!

We then just went straight into it and found a beaut of a web behind our bar in the garden and just decided to take the book cover and go for it!

I wanted room left in the bottom corner to potentially try out the gold foiling so I made sure to ask Chris to position the web more at an angle over the top half of the book! What I ended up with looked beautiful! There were remnants of old flies in there though so I had to rather macabrely try and cut them out using a scalpel knife being very careful not to cut into the web!

I now had a book with a beautiful, intricate cover that I was too scared to touch again to be honest, in case I messed it up and ruined it!

I went back to my sketchbook and listed some ideas as to what I could include in my altered book and what sort of mixed media could I put in there..

Charlottes Web is a book that focuses on friendship, miracles and the cycle of life and these were the subjects I felt I needed to try and touch upon in the book. Seasons played a prominent part in the book too because the book tells the story around time and the seasons and how change and life evolves with each season. The other thing that obviously means more to me than the average reader would be the Vegetarianism side to the story, the fact that a Pig is having his destiny taken away from him, his right to live! I wanted to get some animal rights in there somehow, but at the same time didn’t want to ruin the general feel good vibe of the book and story itself.

Charlottes Web is based around hope and miracles and that life is as beautiful and delicate as a spiders web. I really wanted to emphasise in this book the natural beauty and how delicate a web is. I found online a photo of Zendaya wearing an Alexander McQueen wool blazer, (£13,000 in case you fancy it!) and I just loved how it looked delicate like a web and so intricate with its beading. I knew I had some beads like this left over from when I customized my Jimmy Choo wedding shoes that I could make use of in my book.

I looked into lots of other mixed media techniques; I am familiar with machine embroidery as I used to do a lot of that, but when it came to doing some inside my book it was tricky as the pages were that lightweight they often ripped and tore under the pressure of the machine! The same also happened when I started beading onto the pages, the pages were very frail and thin to be beading into!

It was difficult to try and sketch out design ideas for this book because I never really knew what I wanted to do for it until I just dived right in and got on with it!

I initially when I first started this assignment changed my mind a little and started making my altered book into a bigger format – I very almost scrapped the cover I had made with the cobwebs and tried to make the book in the form of like a sketchbook. It was only a day later that I realised that I wasn’t actually meeting the brief because I wasn’t altering the book really anymore, I was taking the book and placing it into another book! I had to get the idea out of my head that I needed to work on a bigger canvas!

I did love what I had started to create though on the inside covers of this book, even if I did come to the realization that it was more an artists book than an altered book in the end! My original idea for this was that I was going to rip the book into sections (by season!) and fold and curl them up and tie the pages together with ribbon and then slot them into the web! (they might look a bit like flies in the web!). The cobweb material was what I had left hanging around after Halloween, it seemed obvious to use some for this! I also collected some large leaves from the tree outside to represent seasons changing and nature and to also look like they were being blown and caught up in the web.

I used one of the test webs we trialed for inside the cover and to place the word “Humble” next to.

The tin foil letters I stole from an idea I saw on an influencers Instagram page:

For her halloween decor she was obviously going along the theme of Charlottes Web! I thought the tin foil letters were a good idea and attempted to make my own!

After a day of laying everything out in this “new book” I realised that I needed to bring it all back home to the original book…

The next day I unstuck everything and cut to size and restuck it all back into the original book.

You can see from the photos below some other experimental mixed media work I was trying out in my book! I attempted to try and curl paper to look like love hearts!- this worked well until I actually closed the pages on my chunky book and it completely flattened and ruined the shape of the hearts! I also thought it would be nice to add some delicate, intricate pearls to the love hearts too! You can see on my final photos how these look completely different once they are squashed inside the pages!

On the pages with beading I also used some Angelena fibers; these are like glittery, fine pieces of angel hair! You arrange them how you want and then press them inside some greaseproof paper and iron over the top and then the fibers stay together and you can position them within your work how you wish! I allowed them to lightly cover a few of the pages in my book; they could also represent spider webs and the delicate nature of them.

There are a lot of original illustrations in Charlottes Web by Garth Williams which I changed ever so slightly to add message or meaning to the book. There was a page where Ferns mum was worried about her talking to the animals and spending too much time on the farm and she was doubting how a spider could write words into webs.. the Dr told her that to a spider it is as easy as her knowing how to crochet a doily- it’s instinctive. I used one of my Grandmas crochet doily’s she made when she was still alive for this page, I made it look like a web; I free embroidered it on the pages and then tore out the part of the story where the Dr is speaking to Ferns mum. I then stitched some cotton all the way around to make the web look more realistic

When it came to the gold foiling on the cover of the book, I had a few issues. I started to pyrograph on a really low setting over the top of the gold foil and to start off with it was working! By the time I got half way through “Charlottes Web” it wasn’t imprinting the foil onto the cover. I ended up having to get Chris to pick me up a gold pen from Hobbycraft to finish the words off.

You can see how the above photo shows the scratching of the pyrography pen on the front cover but doesn’t show the gold foil imprinting onto the cover. I tried with a higher temperature but that just melted straight through the foil!

The photo above shows how I finished off the letters with the gold pen; it has worked and filled with colour but it doesn’t look professional. The pen has smudged and looks gloopy and thick. I was stuck though and needed an option to fix it so the gold pen had to do!

When it came to putting the pages back into the book I had to rely on my (broken!) glue gun, which cost me 2 blisters on one of my fingers! I had to glue along the spine and wedge all the pages back into it! This was more difficult because the pages were nice and chunky now! The book definitely did not close after! That is why I included the strands of wool hanging out the sides of the book-I did think I could tie the book shut using these, they did not work! Instead they just knotted up and really pulled at the glue inside of the book.

The Final Book

The Videos

This is a sped up time lapse video of my book!

This is a video of me talking through the process and the pages! Please ignore my really croaky voice! I have been ill at home now for 2 weeks with horrendous flu and chest infection!

Conclusion

At the end of this assignment I was pleased with what I had achieved, considering when I first started working on it I was scared at how bad it could potentially go! I wish the foiling on the cover had worked out better but most of all I wish I had more time!! With my course very close to completion, I had to really be strict with myself on the timescale for this and make sure that I did not go over my deadline. There were a lot more mixed media techniques that I researched that I would have liked to have tried out for this and filled more of the pages with. My favourite pieces in the book are the natural cobwebs I “borrowed” for the making of my book and the inside covers, I really liked how these turned out! I really like the mixed media approach and in the future shall definitely look at doing some more work similar to this but because I love digital I shall always bring it back to that instead of producing purely handmade work!