I’ve done a little detour this week: I went back to the Golden Books on my shelf and began a tunnel book.
It was mostly prompted by wanting to use the offcuts I picked up at Bowral from the letterpress cafe there (they were cutting note cards out of book cards, they were happy to give me the offcuts). I have around 2000 of the offcuts.
The Peter Rabbit illustrations, which are Beatrix Potter’s originals are beautiful.
It took a while to get my head around the “narrative” that i could fit into a tunnel. You can’t tell a whole story, so that means you can’t use all of the illustrations, right? (a carousel could in theory use most of them).
Then i had an issue with perspective. For the drama of it and maybe not even consciously the illustrations at the beginning of the book are mostly detailed and small. Then as the drama increases the size of the images increases. Which is exactly the opposite of what I need for perspective.
I had placed all of the images onto the frames before i worked this out, and they just didn’t work in reverse.
so I’m putting this one together knowing that they aren’t perfect, and the next time I’ll scan the images and reprint at the size i want. This does add several extra steps to each book though, so i’m not sure how much that will suit my style (which is to grab the elements and just make).
Did an improv workshop yesterday where the facilitator suggested that the improv way of approaching tasks (just jump in and solve the problems as you go) is good for highly complex tasks. The making of a carousel or a tunnel can feel highly complex to me, and i’m not prepared to sit in that uncomfortable position for very long. So let’s see what happens.
Here are the pix. Each page of the tunnel is A5 size.
