Plotting to Commit Artists' Bookery

I'm having one of those jittery days when I can't quite sit still at the computer for too long, which means I have do do something. Make something. So that book cover I'm working on in Photoshop and Illustrator will have to wait a bit.

I've decided to tackle a couple of my Ideas from earlier in the year, which I hadn't started on because I don't have all the bits I need. I've adapted them so I do have all the bits, and I'm going to start on prototypes as soon as I finish this blog entry. When I started writing this post, I had planned to combine the two Ideas into one, but in the process, I've decided to do them as two separate things again. (So I've just re-written a bunch of this post).

Idea One: If you've been reading this blog long, you may remember some posts I did a year ago with photographs of some of the moths that are attracted to my porch light (here's one here, if you want to refresh your memory). Well, we have lots of moths again this year--including a few I didn't see last year--and that has me all excited again. So I'm going to make an edition (possibly an open one, so I can make them as I feel like it, instead of all at once) of little albums. Sort of like mini photo albums. Then I'll print out the moths--maybe as close to life-size as I can manage, or maybe just at a size I like--cut each one out carefully by hand, and mount it like a specimen in the album.

I've done a little bit with moths and specimens before, so this fits with my previous work. (Such as this moth intaglio print here, the discards of which I've been cutting up and mounting in hand-built Riker mounts to look like real specimens, sort of--pics of that soon, once I have some more made (and there's another project to work on . . .).)

Idea Two: I drink a lot of tea, and one of the places I buy really good tea packages it in round tins with a plastic window on top. I thought they looked a bit like portholes, and so I came up with the idea of "specimen journals." They'll be little round leather and fancy paper books that fit inside the tea tin. It'll have a sea-related "specimen" mounted on the front cover (maybe something cut from copper, maybe a hand-drawing, maybe real shell fragments, or maybe something else). The tin will have faux rivets added around the lid to make it look more like a porthole, and it'll be lined in paper to match the book, or maybe velvet. I only have a couple of these tins, but I keep drinking tea, so soon I'll have more.

I also had ideas of expanding this into books cased in hand-built wooden boxes with round windows, with other sorts of specimens on the covers. I even bought a few clock glasses to use as windows, but of course, I don't have the materials to built the boxes, so those will have to wait.

So that's what I'll be up to today. We'll see how far I get.