I thought it was a happy way to start off the week with this hand-drawn alphabet. Look here and here to see more pictures, including some of the artist’s process of making the drawing.
Month: February 2011
The Exquisite Book
The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game. The book is a project based on the Surrealist game called the Exquisite Corpse. The book is split into ten “chapters.” For each chapter, ten different artists contributed one page. The first artist was given a few words to inspire their drawing. Each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded their own. Each artist used images (and optionally, words) to create the continuation to the story, and the inspiration for the next artist in line. The process took approximately five months.
Each “chapter” is on a fold-out accordion page, so viewers can really see how each artist continued the story. There’s a video here showing a bit about the book and an example chapter.
Physical Hyperlinks
Traumgedanken (Thoughts on dreams) is Mary Fischer‘s final year project at University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, Germany. She says
To ease the access to the elusive topic [dreams], the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.
The pictures below give you an idea of what she’s done, but there are lots and lots here.
Turning a Map into a World
Earlier this week I read a review of a new book, Moby-Duck, subtitled “The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them.” Publisher’s Weekly summerizes the book
Whimsical curiosity begets a quixotic odyssey and troubling revelations about plastics polluting the seas in former high school teacher and journalist Hohn’s charming account of what he learned searching for 28,800 rubber bath toys lost at sea in 1992. His curiosity, prompted by a student’s quirky essay, begins in 2005 around Sitka, Alaska, where yellow “duckies,” frogs, turtles, and beavers washed up after three-story waves buffeted a container ship traveling from China to America…. The author’s quest leads him to a research vessel trawling for degraded plastic in Hawaiian seas, to the Chinese factory where the toys were manufactured, aboard a container vessel traversing the same route as the original ship (a particularly hair-raising section), and finally to the high Arctic to study the science of oceanic drift. Packed with seafaring lore and astute reporting, this enthralling narrative is the Moby Dick of drifting ducks.
I was quite struck by this line in Janet Maslin’s review
As he (the author, Donovan Hohn) puts it, he was not someone, like the explorers of old, who sought to turn the world into a map. “Quite the opposite,” he says. “I wanted to turn a map into a world.”
I’ve been thinking since then about how when we moved to Santa Fe a year ago, much of the town and surrounding area existed for me only as the paper map in my car. Over these past twelve months, I’ve filled it in with places, faces, building details, memories… Could I turn that into a book? Coincidently I saw Don Moyer’s map, below, on the Handdrawn Map Association. It depicts a day he spent in Manhattan. I don’t draw nearly as well, but there’s something for me to explore here… (Moyer’s has more to look at here on Flickr.)
New Reader Diaries
I’ve been making and selling the same reader diaries for over 5 years. They began life as an entry to a calendar show with the title “Marking Time” — I thought then that a traditional calendar was too rigid but as a notorious list maker I incorporated my list-making habit into my calendar entry with a diary for readers. With the new year, I’ve been looking over what I sell, and decided it was time for a reader diary redesign. Maybe I should call them “new and improved” but mostly they are just a bit different. Smaller (3-1/4″ x 5″ rather than 4″ x 7″) and with more room to write notes or comments. Click on a picture below to see the insides and more information.
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Wood Type Wallpaper
My friend Cathy sent me a link to this wood type wallpaper by Wall and Deco. Their website is in italian, but there are lots of pictures. They have other type-related as wallpaper, and some maps as well.