This couldn’t be more true for anyone viewing Ying-Chieh Liu’s reprinted sketchbooks, containing stunning, ethereal illustrations from her numerous travels. It’s an interesting concept to reproduce a personal sketchbook (in I assume, its raw form), without interpretation or much of a narrative, but when they contain such intriguing artwork it’s hard not to be engrossed.

View her Etsy store.

http://www.petercrawley.co.uk

Image courtesy of www.petercrawley.co.uk

Download and make A Sketchbook of Lancaster for yourself.

You can view a preview here. To get a copy (assuming she hasn’t run out, which wouldn’t surprise me) e-mail her at helenvine@homail.co.uk.

In the studio the day after, I assembled a quick eBook from Mandy’s sketches, Radhika’s photographs, and my writing. Designed to showcase a selection of the material created on the day, it’ll be hosted on Diffusion soon with our other efforts.

Tomorrow we’re journeying to the British Museum for more observations, comparing the contrasting locations and further developing what form these trips will take. I’ll probably be Tweeting some snippets of stuff as we’re doing it, so follow bookleteer on Twitter for a peek.

While Mandy was out at lunch Alice and I pounced on the StoryCube puzzle she’s working on because, well, because it looks gorgeous! Pencil sketches of farmyard animals, sea creatures, flowers, kittens, insects and snakes are scattered across a set of nine cubes and lie on a background of  shades of blue. The sketches cross over from one side of the cube to another but change as you rotate the cube so that viewing different sides give the sketches a fantastical feel where kittens have flowers for feet and cows have snakes instead of mouths.

The nine cubes are intended as a puzzle with the goal being to match up all of the sketches of one type across all nine cubes. Sounds simple doesn’t it.. well, Alice and I didn’t manage it in the time Mandy was out for lunch!

ps. I also have to say good-bye today. This will be my last regular post for the bookleteer blog because I begin a full-time research position on Monday. I’ve been working with Proboscis on and off for the past five years and it’s been an incredible journey. I can’t thank Giles and Alice enough for the opportunities I’ve had while I’ve been here – and especially for giving me the chance to meet and work with all the fabulous talented people who’ve been in the studio over that time. Good luck with everything, folks!

A few days ago we published a ScrapBook made at the Vintage Festival for a project Proboscis is participating in called Graffito – a collaborative iPhone/iPad app that lets people draw on a shared canvas. It was used in the Warehouse tent (which had a 1980s theme) as a collaborative VJ system displayed on a giant LED screen. A number of iPhones were lent out to people to draw with, as well as remote users playing from all over the world (the App is free to download from the AppStore).

For part of the 3 day festival, Jennifer Sheridan (Graffito’s project lead) sat in the control booth capturing snapshots of the screen and printing them off using a Polaroid PoGo printer (a very small portable printer that uses USB & Bluetooth to print ‘zero ink’ pictures from mobiles or digital cameras). She then stuck them into a blank eNoteBook I had designed especially for Graffito. Once back from the festival we disassembled the ‘ScrapBook’, scanned it in and republished it so anyone (whether at the festival, a remote participant or just someone interested) could have a hand made tangible souvenir of the project and the event. The process was very simple (though not helped by Apple’s blocking of Bluetooth connection to the PoGo printer on the iPhone) and points the way to similar uses for lots of other projects. In fact the whole process could easily be copied by anyone with an iPhone : simply download the Graffito app, start drawing and use the ‘snapshot’ feature to capture pictures of your favourite screens. Then download the blank version of the Graffito ScrapBook from diffusion.org.uk, print out and stick in the screen shots to make your own personal Graffito ScrapBook. You don’t need a PoGo printer (though they’re now very cheap to buy, around £20) – you could just print out the pictures on normal paper and glue them in.

As we develop Graffito further, part of our thinking will focus around how to personalise the creation of tangible souvenirs from the project even further. It could be possible, for instance, to request a series of screen shots to be taken from a particular time sequence and made into an eBook or StoryCube. This could be particularly fun for a group of people using it to draw collaboratively and could be combined with maps of where users are located in the world (there’s a short movie demonstrating this on the Graffito website).

I think this ScrapBook is a great example of just how simple it can be to design and make custom eNoteBooks or ScrapBooks for projects and events with bookleteer. Using simple and cheap tools like the PoGo printer, its possible to capture and print images using mobile phones (or cameras via USB) which can be stuck in and notes written around them. Whether its for festivals, art events, schools projects, field research or sports events, its possible to create beautiful and engaging ScrapBooks ‘in the field’ – as they are happening – that can be shared with anyone afterwards.

Get in touch if you’d like us to design a way of creating tangible souvenirs like this for your project or event.

Since 1994 Dave McKean’s been producing extensively layered images using computers and digital manipulation. In his collaborations with writers, illustrations and text appear to be intertwined so that the paper becomes part of the content and I was interested to find out how he achieves this effect.  In an interview on Apple’s website he describes how his approach has changed with the increasing sophistication of digital technologies.

“The major things that have changed … are the tools and materials I’ve been able to use. When I started on ‘The Sandman,’ I was aiming toward a translucent collage, a layered look, an insubstantial feeling where you’ve just got an atmosphere. I tried to do that with things like double exposures and different printing techniques. To a degree, this approach is always pretty limited by the fact that the illustration has to be a physical object and, if I have to photograph it, limited by gravity.”

The illustrations for COIL were made in 1998 (COIL 7) for a supposedly ‘anonymous’ piece actually written by legendary indie producer Keith Griffiths (of Koninck fame) about a film he produced by Iain Sinclair & Chris Petit called the Falconer – itself about another ‘legendary’ 60s filmmaker called Peter Whitehead. Its a many-layered piece about becoming trapped in the layers of legend and hype spun around Whitehead and the narrator’s (“Darke”) attempt to unravel the story. Darke is a thinly veiled characterisation of the Falconer’s script writer (and 90s film critic) Chris Darke. The techniques of double exposure and layering that Dave McKean mentions in the interview with Apple are clearly visible in the collages of text and images he produced for this.

The process of creating these illustration begins with “endless drawings.” Out of these, one is chosen and painted onto a backboard of colour photographs and paper collages, a basic canvas already with a life to it, containing interesting textures, colours and shapes. Illustration comes next where McKean paints the characters onto the canvas. From here, the process moves onto the computer. “Sometimes I finish it [the painting] quite well and sometimes I leave it open and rough, scan it and make sense of it in the computer. The compositing is the fun bit, really, and dragging all these elements together all happens very quickly.” As McKean writes, it’s an explorative way of working, “I like the fact that I don’t really know what I’m aiming toward completely. I have an idea, but it’s also the shapes shifted and composited in the computer that allow me to find a nice blend.”

In fact, it seems that his process and approach has remained surprisingly constant as tools and materials have evolved. In this article, he suggests this goes back to his college days at Berkshire College of Art and Design, “Before drawing anything we had to have a clear idea of what we were trying to achieve. So to this day, I still write personal briefs for myself. I still need to be clear in my own mind what I’m doing.”

For me, what is so inspiring about this description of the process is that having a clear plan from the outset in no way constrains the experimental, organic nature of the final illustrations. As he writes, “Techniques may change and go in and out of fashion, but ideas are always worth exploring and re-interpreting.” I wonder if we could get him to design an eBook…

Art Space Tokyo is an intimate guide to the Tokyo art world by Ashley Rawlings and Craig Mod and a very beautiful book describing the buildings and neighbourhoods of 12 distinctive Tokyo galleries. There are maps for each of the areas, illustrations of the galleries by Nobumasa Takahashi  (the cover is a composite map of Tokyo by Craig Mod) alongside interviews and essays.

Inside pages from Art Space Tokyo

In the Preface to Art Space Tokyo Ashley and Craig write:

“We believe that art is not just an end goal, but a process involving all manner of people. Aside from the artists themselves, the art world is made up of collectors, curators, architects, businessmen, npo organizations and the patrons — those of us who gain pleasure from simply viewing and interacting with art — all taking part in some way to foster the creation and consumption process.”

Although here they were referring to the people who work in and with galleries and art they also applied this philosophy to the creation of Art Space Tokyo. Originally printed in 2008 the book was sold out by Spring 2009. In 2010 Ashley and Craig decided that they would like to update and reprint the book as well as create a free web edition for the iPad extending the original concept with videos of the spaces and interviews with local characters, sound-recordings that reveal the ambience of the neighbourhoods and rich interactive maps.

Illustration for GA Gallery, Yoyogi / Harajuku

In the spirit of shared making, it was at this point that they turned to Kickstarter as a way to raise the money necessary to achieve their goal. Kickstarter allows people to advertise their project and ask for contributions towards realising it. Requested contributions for any project range from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars – with your reward increasing alongside your contribution. For example, a pledge of $25 Art Space Tokyo would have got you a PDF of the book plus access to all project updates. At the other end of the scale for a pledge of $2500 you would have received all of the rewards of the other pledge amounts (e.g. copy of the book, original artwork) plus a 1-day tour of the art spaces of Tokyo with Craig Mod.

Is this shared making? Well, yes, I think it is.. As they write in the preface art – or making – is a process not just a product and through Kickstarter Ashley and Craig were offering the opportunity to become part of this process. And I hope the benefits were mutual – they got to reprint the book, contributors got a tangible reward (and presumably a warm fuzzy feeling from helping out two artists).

p.s. If you were thinking of contributing you’re too late… Ashley and Craig wanted $15,000. By 1 May when the pledges closed they had 265 backers and had raised $23,790!

Storybird is a website where you can create your own online illustrated storybook. Aimed at children from 3 – 13 books can be created collaboratively and they positively encourage families, friends and school classes to work together. The artwork for your stories is provided by illustators and visual artists who are able to upload their drawings to the site. Making a Storybird is free though they plan to charge for their printing service when it starts later this year. You can browse by artwork or themes as inspiration to start your book and I have to say I like the look of the site and the illustrations very much.

When collaborating on a Storybird each person can jump in and make changes any time they like, however, they have also put together a more formal collaboration process based on turn-taking. One person starts the Storybird and when they want to pass over to their friend they let Storybird know and an email will be sent to their friend telling them it is now their turn. Storybirds can be kept private or published to the library when complete so that other people can share it too.

As I said, I love the look of the site and the illustrations they currently have in the library. It seems it would be difficult not to create a visually beautiful book from these pictures – and I imagine you can upload your own artwork if you want to illustrate your own stories. Storybird suggests that contributing artwork to Storybird has several benefits for artists including making money from your work. However, I’m unclear how this happens when making a Storybird is free… (If you find out please do let me know!)

How does this relate to bookleteer eBooks? I think it’s interesting that the Storybird exists only as an electronic online storybook (at least for the moment) and I don’t find that this detracts from the reading experience – though perhaps I’d feel differently about this if I was reading with a child, or group of children. On the other hand I can also imagine that if I was a child and had created my own Storybird that I would love to see it printed out as a proper little book that I could take home and show my family and friends. I wonder what it is about tangible, hold-able items that makes them feel so personal and intimate compared to things on a screen?

While Alice was out getting lunch I took some sneaky photos of the 3-dimensional illustrations she’s been working on. The drawings for these come from the ones made in Brixton and Coventry for the Empty Shops Network tour. Parts of them have then been cut out, folded and re-attached to give a diorama feel.

I’d love to see my pop-up eBook experiments and Alice’s drawings come together some day to create a colourful hand-drawn eBook pop-up extravaganza.

This 12 Month Schedule by Alice is my new favourite eBook. It has one month per page with pages for notes  and every page is decorated with illustrations by Alice. It’s designed as a notebook to carry around and use as a way to keep yourself organised, jot down ideas or make sketches. But seriously, could you bring yourself to write on top of Alice’s amazing drawings??

Cover image (from In Good Heart series)

The Schedule eBook can be downloaded at diffusion.org.uk. And if you have access to an A3 printer then you are even luckier because you can make it up at the new A5 size and enjoy the illustrations at twice the size (or have twice the room for making notes..).

If you want to see more detail of the pictures check out Alice’s Flickr stream.

It was really inspiring for us (myself, Karen Martin & Stefan Kueppers representing the bookleteer team) to see just how enthusiastic they were about picking it up and using it for different purposes. In not time at all half a dozen eBooks and StoryCubes had been made with bookleteer as we talked about different contexts and types of use the Shareables could be put to.

Matthew Sheret has posted some pictures from the evening on his Flickr site:

Here are some other images of the things they made:

StoryCube by Emilie

eBooks by Matt, Tom & Mark

StoryCube by Anne

StoryCube by Julia