My very last grad studio!

For the past 3 weeks I've been taking an intensive 9-4 bookbinding and print portfolio class at Tyler to fulfill my very last graduate studio credits! I'm both happy and nostalgic to be so close to the end of my master's studies (I want to be a perpetual student). But here's what I made this past few weeks:

 We tried out a few different bindings including a Japanese stab binding, an adhesive flip book, and several maze books. I already knew how to do the stab binding with odd number holes, but now I know even-numbered holes as well (start at the top hole instead of the center). I've got my maze books corralled in a little purple sleeve with a notch clasp. We also learned how to construct various boxes, so my first book got a little purple magazine-style box/sleeve, and I also made a map-covered box just the perfect size for holding folded roadmaps.

 My first real book was printed as one large image, below, and cut and folded into a little maze book. It has the map printed on front and back, a river-like path in green, a bicycle-chain path in purple, the words "Who is in the driver's seat?", and all of the various modes of transportation that have been a part of my life. There's my little red tricycle, my dad's big white van, a school bus, an Air France plane, a PATCO train, my first car (a chevy corsica), a SEPTA bus, a Turkish airlines plane, a Bosporus ferryboat, my white Jetta, and my current bicycle.

 I'm very happy with how layered it is.

 I also like how it starts and ends on a bicycle- the mode of transportation I love the most for the sense of freedom it gives.

 Printing and finishing that up took up the first two weeks, partly because I missed the mornings of week 2 due to teaching camp. But the final project fulfilled an idea I've wanted to do FOREVER.

 It marries my love of origami, coptic binding, color theory, and pattern essentials. I printed a gradation of flats from cream to dark brown, then printed subsequent layers of crosshatched stripes on the exteriors. The interiors have a gradation from pink-orange-yellow-green-teal- and purple shifting from stripes to squares to triangles in increasing complexity and back.

 Each page (56 of them) was folded into an origami book that springs open and snaps shut revealing a surprising interior to these rather formal and monotone exteriors (got to watch out for the quiet ones).

 The great part about the coptic binding is that it allows the pages to flex, snake-like. It's a very playful book/sculpture.

In critique, my professor noted how meditative it was- the layering of the print colors, actually crosshatching the print instead of printing crosshatch screens, all the folding, the one-by-one process of coptic binding, and the motions the viewer must go through to view the interiors. Seems I can't get away from that meditative process. It's the same as stitching- all that repetition and slow building of something.
I could use some meditation.