An Explosion of Life
Date Completed: October 24th, 2022
Medium: Altered book, mixed media
For this project, I was given the task of creating an art piece out of a book, a genre of art also known as Altered Book Art. The goal was to create a piece of art that is both aesthetically pleasing and relevant to the content of the book.
I chose to use a book about bird species with the goal of showing the sheer variety of avian life that exists in the world. I chose this particular book because of the illustrations; I really like the art style, and chose to use only the art from the book as decorative elements in the piece. I cut out windows through the pages with an X-acto knife, leaving certain birds intact and planning to arrange them so that they appear to be looking through the “windows”. Other pieces are cut out and glued to other pages, but for the most part, I used a subtractive process.
As of the time of this writing, I don’t consider this piece finished. I still have cutouts of images that I would like to arrange around the base of the book, and I would still like to mold and shape the base itself. I would also like to attach cutouts of flying birds using wire to the top of the book. I am happy with what I have so far, and look forward to completing this project.