Book Arts (ILL3) - Accordion Books

An Accordion Book is made by continuously folding paper back and forth into a literal accordion shape. If that wasn't a very helpful explanation, here is a proper definition - the link to this quote will also give a detailed explanation on how to make one: "The accordion book is a folded structure; the book block is made by simply folding a sheet of paper back and forth in page-width increments" - (http://www.designsponge.com/2013/03/bookbinding-101-accordion-book.html)

As this was my second Book Arts lesson, I made sure this time around I included a bit more of a narrative into my work. The theme we were presented with was 'journeys' and so I decided to focus on something I was familiar with - the walk from my house to the woods. I thought this may be interesting to illustrate and it would be a good stimulus for incorporating texture into my work.

Here are a few photos of my accordion book:

I wanted the first page to be quite creepy and also include texture. I went with quite a dark theme originally with the black lines on the background and the navy blue branches; so I chose to use yellow writing to bring a bit of life back to it. It became extremely fiddly cutting everything out, but I really liked the effect it had and so I decided to carry on with the theme of cut out collaging.

This is the first page where I really became experimental with textures as I started incorporating some of my own textures from my personal texture library. I carried on with the cutting out theme when it came to the text as I thought this might be a nice touch as opposed to just hand-writing the text. I also decided to add the piece of string last minute so that the book would physically have a bit of texture and also a bit of a 3D element.

Here I used the insides of envelopes as the background because I thought it was a really interesting pattern that wouldn't clash too much with the collaged trees. I also started experimenting with photocopying here by inverting colours on patterns and changing the colours in general. This gave me more freedom when it came to materials as I didn't have to worry about re-using the same patterns.

I then decided to fasten the whole thing with a piece of string because the accordion style meant that the book was constantly flapped open and I didn't want people to be able to see into the book without interacting with it. I also thought it added to the accordion effect as it would literally spring open when you removed the string.

Here are some links to my Pinterest boards so that you can visually see things that inspired me during these workshops: - Zines: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/aphipps98/zine/- Collage: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/aphipps98/collage/- Hand Lettering: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/aphipps98/lettering/