Monday, March 10, 2008

MiT, book for 2nd senior, day 1 & 2

Finally got back to the studio today and did some work on the book.

This first image was from a few days ago—the map mockup. These are 9 of the 10 prints that my Rock Star senior made over the 4 week period that we were meeting. Based on this one attempt, I concluded that the map had to be much bigger for it to make sense as a map, and would be too cumbersome to deal with, both to print and for the viewer.



One of the other options was to treat each print as a 'letter'. So here's a modified concertina, held together with a 'piano hinge'. Each page is an envelope that holds a print that's attached to each of the concertina folds.



Opened up to one of the pages. On the left, the back of an envelope; on the right, the front of the envelope. I drew a little stamp on there; not sure that's what I'll do. I am going to print either the outside of the envelopes or the inside of the envelopes, or maybe both, just not sure which or what yet.



One of the envelopes opened up. This is all made from scrap paper and prints that had been rejected. So this one has an old print on it. And I kind of like having a dark print on the inside. I think it sets off her print nicely.



The piano hinge pin is removed and the concertina is opened up. Again, this is an rejected print, but here's probably where I'll be printing an image of a night sky with lots of stars, or maybe fireworks.

The concertina would be the same height as the envelopes; my scrap paper is just a little short.



I'm using a piece of cardboard for the hinge pin in the mockup, but I was thinking maybe using a glow stick or one of those fiber optic wands. I searched around for some options, but they all look pretty ugly, unfortunately, so maybe not. I also looked for some really thin candles, and they might work. I'll be putting words on the inside of the concertina, and maybe on the envelopes too, so the idea of the candles can be worked into the book.

Woohoo! I found out tonight that they're going to pay me for the Portland Open Studios web site work! What a wonderful surprise! And it's not a pittance either.

OK, on to the 7 facts about me tag that I responded to yesterday but did not propagate. So I'm playing along and tagging these fine citizens of the blog slog:

1. The Yarn Princess...she's probably got lots of weird little facts to tell, if you can read Chinese.

2. The Life and Times of Michael5000, who will hopefully regale us all with some of the lessor known weird facts about him.

3. And Sundry, who tagged me with my very first tag a bit ago, and now I get to return the favor.

4, 5. Hey, this one is good for two! Sven & gl at The Scarlet Letters!

6. And The Muse, who writes so beautifully, I'm sure that if she had extra pinkie toenails and wrote about them, it would still sound like poetry.

7. Chicken Hat tells all.

The usual rules apply...to play or not to play, that is the question, but I won't call you poop-heads if you don't.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love seeing how you're thinking about this. Very cool. Thanks for the photos.

And I've been thinking more about the outside/inside of the books, because I do see what you're trying to get at. I think I'm afraid that people will be uninterested in the generic sameness of the covers and won't ever even get to the inside -- won't take the time to look. (Which is, of course, what we do in real life.)

But that's the job of the artist, right? To get the message across.

gl. said...

loving the mit progress! such fun to see something they've made!

re: open studios: good! they -should- pay you for the web work! but i'm surprised they didn't tell you that until after you agreed to do it. :)

hmmm, if we've already played 7 random things do we do it again? and then tag you, who will tag us again...? such a vicious meme circle...

fingerstothebone said...

chele -- yes, that is the job of the artist! So we'll see what happens...

gl -- the board didn't ask me to revamp the web site, I just decided on my own that it would be easier to do than to keep trying to work around the go live output. Then they discovered that they had a little extra money, so they decided to pay me. If only all volunteer gigs worked out like that! Yeah, I thought I vaguely remember you had already done the 7 facts thing. It does get harder and harder. M5K just did it too, right before I got to him.