Andersen M Studio has created this amazing stop motion animation for Star Alliance airlines, using boarding passes that transform into a intricate paper representation of their destination, through some nifty cutting and creasing.
They’ve also animated scenes from Maurice Gee’s novel, Going West, using the actual pages from the book. This one beggars belief.
These remind me of Karen Martin’s previous posts that featured similar concepts, particularly pieces by Yuken Terya and Brian Dettmer. Oh, what humble paper is capable of.
A recently published Diffusion Highlight, The Thetford Travelling Menagerie by Lisa Hirmer and Andrew Hunter of Dodolab, is one of the few eBooks so far to use the A5 landscape format, the end result being particularly striking and accomplished. It stands out amongst the Proboscis bookshelves, aided in part, by the lovely illustration on its cover – a procession of silhouetted creatures in all manner of shapes and sizes.
“The goal of The Thetford Travelling Menagerie is to use stories and images of local animals (past and present, real and imagined) to inspire people in the community to share their perceptions of Thetford today. Our stories and images of animals are offered to trigger memories and tales, a menagerie of beasts to conjure up stories of Thetford, its history of change and its current state of flux. What belongs, what’s been lost, what keeps people away, and what draws them in? What can we learn and share about migration, displacement, settlement and change from the creatures and natural world around us?”
It would be great to see more eBooks taking advantage of this larger format – it allows for greater design and really lends the publication a sense of value. It’s perfect for landscape photography, perhaps even for mini coffee table books if using high quality paper and a capable printer, or the Publish and Print On Demand service.
In my last post, I looked at some of the innovative ways eBooks have been made, using a variety of materials. Today, I’m focusing on some interesting printing and layering techniques that I’ve found, in a bid to inspire budding bookleteers.
Xavier Antin has constructed an extraordinary printing chain made from a stencil duplicator (1880), a spirit duplicator (1923), a laser printer (1969), and an inkjet printer (1976) – spanning almost one hundred years of technology. Each uses a single ink from the CMYK colour model, which explains why the book printed through it resembles a series of hazy retro 3D images ; a disorientating, yet impressive effect.
Abigail Reynolds collages different images of the same building or scene, then cuts and fold’s portions of the overlaying paper to produce new representations with depth and occasionally dizzying perspectives. A similar effect could be created with eBooks, by printing on both sides of the paper, and manipulating the top layer. Getting the orientation right would be tricky, but the end result could be intriguing. Anyone up to the task?
Our former bookleteer blogger, Karen Martin, wrote about the effects of using different types of paper when printing eBooks in a previous post, “Paper Selection“, but having just rediscovered a few examples, I thought I’d share them with you again.
Carmen Vela Maldonado created these lovely eBooks by experimenting with different coloured paper and card, as well as cutting out parts and using scanned scraps of paper as backgrounds. So much more impressive then using standard paper, they add a whole new dimension of texture and depth, engaging the reader on a higher level. “A Manifesto for Black Urbanism” by Paul Goodwin, which uses black ink on black card and faint images of urban environments printed onto tracing paper, looks stunning. The map overlays used in “Dusk”, by Saki, also work really well – visual place-marks to a tale defined by its location and references to surrounding areas.
I thought I’d share this, courtesy of the chaps at It’s Nice That. Peter Crawley stitches illustrations into watercolour paper with a pin, needle and cotton thread; the elaborate images and precise lines look more like a digital printout than embroidery. His architectural illustrations are stunning, even more so when you take a closer look at their humble stitch makings. Take a look at “Architectural Reflections”, where the thread has been left dangling under the image to depict what look like roots under the earth. This combination of almost photo realistic imagery with the evidence of its handcrafted origins, integral to the concept of the piece, demonstrates the extraordinary capabilities and visual effects possible from paper and crafted works – comforting in this era of rapidly developing digital mediums.
Caroline Maclennan, a student at Lancaster University who worked with Alice Angus on her As It Comes project, created this eBook to document the research and people involved whilst exploring independent shops and traders in Lancaster. It’s composed of images printed from a mobile pogo printer and sketches, as well as newspaper clippings, tracings of maps and handwritten notes – all contrasted against a rustic brown paper sketchbook, which has been scanned and converted into an eBook with bookleteer. This lends a wonderful handcrafted aesthetic, letting the reader see a personalised account of a project examining human interactions and community, and serves as the perfect accompaniment to the work Alice has produced.
Another illustrator highlight on the bookleteer blog, courtesy of Stuart Patience. His drawings based on the Ragnarok, a book of Norse mythology, are spectacular. These highly detailed, surreal illustrations, contrasted against vast blank space, are the iconography of vivid, prophetic dreams; fitting considering the apocalyptic saga they were inspired by. What really spurred me into featuring his work however, are the images from his sketchbook, as Mandy, Radhika and myself are currently embarking on regular expeditions around the city, capturing public scenes through sketches, poetry and photographs. His seemingly hasty, broad lines, manage to convey a surprising amount of facial features and character traits, and are surely something to be inspired by. I can’t get any direct links to the pieces I’ve just mentioned, so you’ll have to forage around his site to find them – I’m sure you won’t mind stumbling across his other drawings in the process.
Time for me to feature some staggering artwork from illustrator Helen Vine now, taken from her zine “TREASURE”. A 15 page, saddle-stitched, illustration / photography zine inspired by “cemeteries and taxidermy museums”. Thankfully I share this slightly morbid fascination towards various creatures of the rigor mortis persuasion. Her work is amazingly intricate and captures the beautiful patterns and textures of natural geometry found in animals – it’s mesmerising. I was so engrossed in the cover, I didn’t notice at first glance what appears to be a flamingo made out of leaves, subtly camouflaged amongst the other birds, or the wood-grain effect beak of some unknown majestic creature, one weary eye peeking out.
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.
I mentioned this set of Storycubes briefly in one of my first ever blog posts, “Comics, Cubed”, but it’s elaborate concept deserves another shout-out. Warren Craghead, an artist and curator, created ten Storycubes depicting a fictional autobiography, each representing a decade of his life (the last, in a touch of dark humour, simply shows an urn). Starting with his birth in 1970, and ending with his “death” in 2060, the cubes are drawn in different style and tones, the surreal, abstract illustrations portraying the world view and imagined future of a man who, in his own words, “is constantly drawing”. Warren’s cubes have received some pretty positive reviews from the comic scene as well – Matthew Brady described it as “a sweeping, fascinating portrait of a life” on his blog.
Download and make “A Sort Of Autobiography” for yourself here.
Another gem which has been featured on www.fastcodesign.com, and something my brain is still trying to recover from. Created by Michael Hansmeyer, and constructed from 2700 laser cut sheets of cardboard with wooden cores, these columns were spawned by an algorithm fed into a computer, forming “computational architecture”, with up to 16 MILLION facets. It’s absolutely staggering. After being cut out, the sheets left behind form a negative, empty-space column. The image of this is unreal; it looks like the hallucinatory imaginings of an alien spacecraft, mechanical yet almost organic, something that wouldn’t be out of place from the trippy sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blow your mind here.
