Some information I found out about sevens
A while ago I saw some Instagram posts from an OCA Foundation student who had collaged pieces of printed papers onto baby board books. We chatted about it and she said she had originally seen the idea on Pinterest. I started looking out for board books in the charity shops so I could give it a go too.
Having found lots of science, maths and nature information amongst my research into the number 7 I decided to make a sort of zine/artist book hybrid using one of my board book finds. This forms one element of my seven artists' book project (forty nine years is) Seven Times Seven.
I initially grabbed some cyanotypes thinking they would make a great sciencey background for my information but loved the effect so much I didn’t want to cover them up with anything so carried on and made this into a book in it’s own right. It isn’t perfect – I can’t really work out how to make the pages open properly/lie flat and it is quite wrinkly and creased but I’m embracing that and overall really like it as a way to present these prints. Certainly preferable to them sitting in an old portfolio case in the corner.
I found a slightly bigger book and made a start on my book for the project. My planning process tends to be fairly haphazard – on one hand I had been thinking about it for ages and had a good idea of the information I wanted to include, on the other I hadn’t worked out how to say it or present it. I just got going as it is the way I work best. I decided which order to present the information in and prepared the book with backgrounds I thought would work. I had a vague idea I would collage on top but I still wasn’t sure at this stage.
Once the backgrounds were in place I grabbed my box of paper pieces and got going. Somewhere along the way deciding to use the same method of tracing text from my laptop screen onto masking tape as I had used for my locations book. Also, for some reason I was a fairly long way into the process before I decided to write each piece of information in 7 words(so obvious) – I really don’t know how I manage to achieve anything with this kind of planning but it seems to work so I go with it!
Here are my finished pages, the book had 8 double spreads so I used some paper I had painted a pattern on to previously as a fly page. Like with the cyanotype book the pages are quite creased, maybe more so as I have made sure they all open flat. I haven’t worked out how to get round this yet and perhaps should have done some more tests before jumping in. I used the green tape around the edge to tie the book in with others I have already completed for the project.
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