A Little Book o' Mess

Those of you who have done a Foundation course in Art will know the importance of mark-making, especially in those first few weeks. The 'Day-to-Day' project I'm doing now involves a lot of experimentation with media, and I figured I should have a little book to accompany my large sketchbook and sheets of A1 - a little book o' mess. But a book of nice mess, I feel it draws the eye and appears interesting (I'm a sucker for tactile pieces and textures). Weaving, cappuccino powder (that smells awful, I may add), PVA, black dye, glue-gun strands, pinpricks, acetate that's been printed on, extra sheets stitched and wax all feature in this, and I'm not even a third of the way through it yet.




The first two pages of this book - the very first is weaved with newspaper and splashed with wax, PVA and coffee after having a little spray-paint applied. The wax and PVA was also there to stop it falling apart; it wasn't the most secure of weaves and it kept falling out x_X





The 'lemon' page and acetate page were both stitched to the spiral binding. One was a wrapper from a lollipop and I wanted to use it for something as I found the little drawings cute, and the acetate ... darn, I wish the PVA had dried clear but because there were a good few layers in it and I'd trapped the glue, it didn't. Still, no matter - it worked quite nicely. I used the acetate I'd previously used for screenprinting; I'd had no idea what to do with them afterwards and this seemed like a nice use of them.



I then experimented with taking parts out of pages and replacing them with other materials (in this case, another bit of acetate that was printed on). Also there you can see some weaving with receipts and carrier bags (two things I seem to collect a lot of).



Experimenting with graphite shavings, and more writing. On the opposite page you can see some glue-gun strands and pin-pricks (the latter is a bit time-consuming but it's lovely for texture 'specially if you apply coffee or tea afterwards).



More fun with spray-paint. I really like the left page on this one because you can actually see the print on the acetate and the coffee-stain on the prior pages - a nice touch. I don't think I'll be doing anything further to that page even though it's still quite plain compared to the others - the little window is nice enough.