Wednesday, June 6, 2012

The Little Book continued

Last weekend I had the good fortune to spend a lot of time in my studio and that made it possible for me to finish the Little Book, which is the small colorful journal I have been putting together.



I showed you the first spreads of this journal here. Today I will show some more spreads and coming Friday I will show you the final few spreads and how the cover looks.



As I already told you in the first post about this journal, it is not really finished. To me a journal is never really finished unless there's writing on the pages. Sometimes I think I only decorate my spreads in order to make the writing look more interesting. ;-)



Making this journal was like a fun experiment in a way. I really made it from scratch, sewed the signature together, painted the white crispy pages as colorful as I could and added lots of images and texts from magazines and other sources.



But I also started adding more things like borders with paint markers, I put in stuff like sticky back ribbons and I used washi tape to create selfmade text elements. It was a lot of fun to do.



Still... it also taught me something else and that is that I prefer my usual way of making a journal over this fully premade one. In my everyday journal I decorate one or two spreads at a time, write on those spreads and then move on to the next one or two spreads.



I do like having the journal filled with color already, but the decorating I prefer to do as I go. It somehow feels more genuine to me to do it that way. Also if you don't do everything up front there is way more room for spontaneity and adding images from everyday life as it passes by.



So...I don't think I will every completely decorate a journal like this for myself again before I start writing in it. It is a lot of fun though and a journal like this might make a wonderful gift or giveaway or I could adapt it and just turn it into a photobook or something. I don't know yet, the ideas are still kind of swirling in my head (that's nothing new really, there's always ideas in my head).



Anyway, these were the spreads I wanted to show you today. Hope you come back on Friday to see the rest of the book.

Have a wonderful artsy day!