Trial and Error and Error :D

For my soft cover books, I decided to work with the contrasting ideas of sound and silence. I thought about how I was going to actually execute these for several days before I got down to any real executing. I thought it would be interesting to write about silence and use images to interpret the concept of sound because I wanted to give myself a challenge (foolish!). For silence I wrote 12 images that I thought communicated silence through the moment being described (only 10 made it to the book though). I made the book an accordian because the order that each image is read in doesn't really matter; they can be viewed separately or as a group. I made it tiny, like a secret. I liked to think of the book as being really quiet -- shhhh, silence! So here it is:

With this one, I ran into a problem that I think I will have a lot and that is finding paper that is just right for the inside pages. Regular printer paper is too thin, card stock is too thick. I know other weights exisit, but where can I find them? I wound up gluing two sheets of legal paper together to get the thickness I wanted. Not the most efficient decision, but it did the job.

I knew immediately that I wanted to illustrate the concept of sound -- the one problem? I didn't really know how. Then after reading a book of Carl Sandburg's poetry for my other independent study, I came across the line "look for songs hidden in eggs." I thought that was really cool, and that line was the inspiration for my other book, listen to songs hidden in eggs. I like the idea of songs and music being born. So here it is. Sorry for the tremendous amount of photos. I won't be in class, and I wanted you to see it all because it took a REALLY long time.

So if you can't tell, it's an egg, hatching in a mouth, and the last page continues to fold out as the bird flys away. I hope you can hear the egg cracking and the wings beating and the bird song (that way it fits with my sound/silence idea).

Again, I struggled with the perfect paper and settled on card stock. Although it is a little thick, I wanted this book to be sturdy and the colors to be more vibrant than they are on regular paper. All the images I created in Photoshop and Illustrator. I had the most trouble with the mouths--pen tool to the rescue! For both books I created a lot of practice ones, so that when it came to printing and putting together the real deal I wouldn't have a lot of trouble. Sorry for the long posting. Have a lovely class! Also, I'm a terrible speller, and I am typing on a keyboard that is not mine. Please pardon any mistakes.