Altered Book Illustration Project

For this project we were required to alter a book in a sculptural sort of way. Off the back of the last project I felt that the best way to do this now was just try lots of different things until I find something I like the idea of. With that in mind I went to the charity shops in and on the walk to East Ham from my house in Plaistow and bought a few books were ideas popped out at me straight away.

I bought a book on John Wayne and cut it in such a way that a few of the pages stood up and made a 3d shape of John Wayne shooting someone in a duel. It was very flimsy and just kept flopping over, so I left that idea alone.

I bought an illustrated old testament which was quite a nice book and started defacing it because I thought it was cool F U to religion  but it looked shitty and I felt that I was being no better than those religious nut cases stood on street corners shouting about how God's really gonna save you. So I stopped doing this idea as well.

I also bought a book called City of Bones, I tried to glue all the pages together and then cut it into a city map like New York City but all the buildings were bone shaped and the island was bone shaped. However glueing each of the pages with PVA to one another just turned the book into an unmaleable pulp that was difficult to work with, so I also scrapped that idea.

What I did like about the City of Bones idea though was making a map within the pages of a book, with this in mind it dawned on me I should cut up the Lord of the Rings trilogy to represent a map of the world, as Tolkien was mad for maps as well he made a lot for me to reference, and it seems like a good homage to the story/journey.

I was met with a lot of flack from my flatmate Dan and friend Anastasia, they couldn't believe I'd bought a nice new set of LOTR books to cut up, but I figure that if I cut up something that I care about I'll try to do a better job and just make a more informed piece.

I used cut nets out of the pages and stuck them together to form models of the iconic buildings. With the mountains I was trying to do them like 3D contour lines but when I was doing Mount Doom I realised I should have done all of the mountains like that instead. The tree leaves are made by sticking a lot of irregularly cut pages together.

The whole process was very fiddly and uncomfortable, the glue I used was very strong and kept getting on my fingers as I was making such tiny models, and then the models would stick and so I'd have to cut bits off of my fingers, sometimes with bits of my finger still stuck to the model.

 From the journeys beginning into the darkness.

 The Fellowship of the Ring

Birds eye view of the Fellowship of the Ring 

Minis Tirrith and Osgiliath 

The White tower of Isengard and Fangorn Forest 

Lothlorien Forest and the entrance to the Mines of Moria 

The Return of the King birds eye view 

The Two Towers birds eye view 

 The Two Towers

The view of Rivendell from Weathertop

The response to these photographs has been that I need to get better at photography, so next time I photograph my work I will use a tripod, get in some better lights and set the camera to a slower shutter speed.

I have curated these books as well as my some of my class mates within the display cabinet at the front of our illustration class room, where people who feel my photography is lacking can see the real things.

I don't think I would make this sort of art again, it is very difficult for a result that does not look worth the amount of time it takes, but it was fun to look up all the Lord of the Rings history and background again.