Between Going & Staying

After learning the Nag Hammadi structure, which traditionally uses leather for the cover, I decided to push the limits of the materials by using manipulated suede in place of leather. Different issues, but overall the materials worked better than I expected. The suede is the by-product of thinning vegetable tanned goat. The surface was initially rolled with a couple of coats of methyl cellulose, then printed tissue paper bits were collage on and held in place with PVA. A top coat of methyl cellulose was liberally applied, then the suede was put under pressure for several hours. The main problem is the chipping away of the tissue paper at fold line of the turn-ins. A fix for that would be to not extend any collaging of materials onto the areas reserved for turn-ins. As this was more a structural experiment, I decided to use selections from Julie Chen's Artists Book Ideation Deck. Here's a list of the adjectives I drew from the deck: unconventional, poetic, simple, intuitive, pessimistic. The structure card draws were: muted or pastel color, collage technique, centered on page layout, found text, symbols, diagrams, charts, etc as imagery, with a historic structure. I pre-selected historic structure as I knew I would be using the Nag Hammadi for this book.