Finished Artist Book

Artist Statement

This artist book was a way for me to combine two of my artistic passions together, photography and drawing.

The book revolves around four of my cousins. Out of everybody in my family I chose these two pairs of siblings, Ben & Becca and Maddy & Holly, because they are both each represent a different stage of my childhood. Each drawing represents an aspect of their personalities, a memory I associate with them and/or a passion of theirs.

Ben & Becca are the oldest of the four. Many of the drawings they inspired come from personal experiences I’ve had with them, living 500 meters up the road we basically lived at the others house after school and on weekends. These experiences range from when we were little to things they’re doing now.

Maddy & Holly are the younger of the two. Being the babies of the family, many of their drawings are inspired by their personalities, things they’d like to do and what I picture them doing in the future.

Many of the drawings also represent me and how my drawing has evolved.

 The title of my book, Drawn Together, comes from the cartoon, Drawn Together, which essentially is Big Brother for cartoons. This inspired my book title because like any family both theses two sets of siblings have given me many endless hours of entrainment. The title also fits well with my book because I have literally drawn on the pages, in a cartoon style, and brought them together.

To get a quality end product I had to come up with an idea that would allow the photographs and the drawings to easily stand apart from one another but allow then to mix seamlessly. The photo frames allowed me to use a select area in each photograph to draw in or around and provided my subjects with something to interact with, which also brought out aspects of their personalities which inspired my drawings.

I choose to print my photographs in black and white and draw in black to make the two media’s mix better and have an overall graphic feel. The layout of my book has also been kept simple so it doesn’t subtract from the work and helps fuel the graphic theme within it.

Overall I believe I have created something unique, a mixture of photography and drawing, that is inspired by and biased on members of my family.  

So this is my first finished page, I've made it so I have photos where I have drawn inside the frame and left the outside intact and the other way around as well.

For my layout I like the A4 pages in the previous post (the portrait orientated ones), then I have the others which is the A3 tiny images and this above one. I think with the placement of my images on the A3 canvas I can easily cut them down to A4 or I can redo my A4 layouts to suit A3 landscape format. This is one of the things I'm having trouble deciding.

If I print A4 = 10 pages including the cover

If I print A3 = 6-7

I really like the idea about leaving the pages loose.

Artist book Pictures and Layout

So my idea has been inspired by my family and my I drawings. The use of the photo frame is a tool I've used to separate my drawings from the subjects. I've make two types of drawings from this, the frame as a window to another world and the frame as a tool for the subjects to enter another world.

I'm having trouble thinking of ways to print and bind my book. At this stage I've decided to print on matt because I want to avoid the marker turning weird colours like brown and purple that I've noticed come out on gloss. I've printed on a A1 size poster but the marker ink isn't taking to the paper the way I want it to. I'm now printing on A3 from a sketch pad on a home printer. I've also experimented with printing on lined exercise paper an I really like this look as well. 

So I'm a little stuck with how to put this  together, I was thinking a hand made pocket folder where all the pages sit loose. This would end up looking like a collection of bits and pieces.

Picture wise, my images are black and white with strong contrast. I decided to make then this way so they would look a little more graphic and complement my images better.