This book was for the Coptic binding assignment. I think that this type of binding is my favorite, it is very neat and the stitches look great on the spine. I like choosing colors for my thread, I always think about which color would go best with the color palette of my book, for Literary Hodgepodge I chose a sort of gunmetal grey color to compliment the black and white of the cover, and as its a neutral, it wouldn't interfere too much with the multicolored pages.
I also had fun with my fonts. I know there are people who are font people, who can look at a random flyer or advertisement and say "oh, they used a rounded helvetica," I'm not one of them. The only thing I've really learned in art school about various fonts is that Comic Sans is the worst font ever. Personally I don't really have too much against it, besides it being a bit juvenile and overused. Anyway, for the various fonts in the books I used different downloaded fonts from free font websites. I think it works, I wanted unique fonts that didn't stand out too much. I also used my own handwriting and actual pages scanned from books.
The idea of the book was to make pages for some of my favorite books or types of literature, I only ended up with nine double spreads, (five one page sections) I printed these pages on my home printer on bristol paper. Which was very aggravating as I had to get the page orientation exactly right (because of the double-sided printing) but in the long run sooooo much cheaper than going to the print lab. I think the quality of the images is probably just as good.
I used many different methods in designing the pages, I scanned various pages in books and sketches I had already done as well as photographs I had taken. I also googled images from the internet of Winnie the Pooh and Boris Karloff etc. and designed quite a few entirely in photoshop, I would then print them out and in some cases I would collage on top with paint or pen, wintergreen oil transfers, images printed or drawn on tracing paper. The cover was also done entirely in photoshop, based off of an assignment in freshman year which I re-did and improved upon.
The sections are Spread 1: Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, Spread 2: Pablo Neruda 1, Spread 3: Pablo Neruda 2, Spread 4: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind 1, Spread 5: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Coney Island of the Mind 2, Spread 6: William Carlos Williams' The Great Figure 5, Spread 7: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Spread 8: Various children's books, Spread 9: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The last page is a single page dedicated to Where the Wild Things Are and The Little Prince.
As for the images in conjunction with the text, I tried to choose images that really represented what the text was about, like for the Coney Island of the Mind spreads, I chose images from Coney Island that I took during the summer that I felt really went well with the content of the poems. I chose the poems simple because they were my favorite Ferlinghetti poems and I believe it was just pure luck that I had images that I really liked that went perfectly with them. I draw a lot of things in my sketchbooks in response to works I've read, like the Neruda pages, I find his poems so visually stimulating that I want to depict them. And in the cases of The Raven and The Great Figure 5, I wanted to copy works by masters responding to the same text (Manet and Demuth. And as for the children's books and The Hobbit, I used images found in the books themselves, the original illustrations that we all know. I just had fun trying out different processes and exploring my own connection to the literary works that I love. I think all in all it is one of my most successful books that I've made, there would have been a few things I would change if I could (like adding a nicer table of contents, a title page and a colophon) but I am very proud of this particular book.
