#i've been on a fountain pen kick recently

[muhnow]

sat outside for 10 minutes

[joannaliangart]

There Are Good Things Yet To Bury (2024) 7.5 x 9 in Case bound book, 84 pages. Photography and poetry.

There Are Good Things Yet To Bury features photos of community gardens and poems on climate grief, gardening, and the purpose of hope. Physically cut into many of the pages are windows, enabling fragments of images and text on the previous and following pages to be reactivated and recontextualized. The book reflects on how gardens nurture during crises, and the futures that hope can bring us.

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Final project for my VAST class this semester! Agh I really think it’s my new favourite…!!

I was actually struggling with this one for a while, I just couldn’t seem to clarify the concept in my mind clearly enough. I think it was writing the rainbow poem when things really started to pull together, which was tricky as hell making sure it was still coherent through all 7 ‘window’ pages AS WELL AS a full spread! But I truly had SO much fun writing all the poems in this book it was such a joy :’) 

This is a project that I would love love love to be made into multiples and distributed in some capacity... I don't know if traditional publishing would ever take something like this on with how many window cuts there are haha, not that I know how complicated or uncomplicated it would be (but certainly more than if 0 windows lol). The profs on my panel review mentioned that I could look into getting a grant to make multiples but hoo that still sounds kinda spooky to me awaaa

But!! Ever since my Sunlight is moonlight book with that one window cut at the end I've wanted to do more with cutting into the page and having whatever is visible through the window be recontextualized with the flip of a page AH it's so fun and so much potential for poetic play!!!

process photos/more thoughts:

These documentation photos were kinda a pain btw lmao (i mean when are they not) i'm struggle so much with themm.. I'm also trying to be more aware of how much of a poem I'm showing in these photos as I recently learned that most literary magazines etc won't accept submissions if that piece of writing is posted (ie published) online already. I think small excerpts might be okay as long as it's not the full piece???? awagh I don't know I'm still learning AND I don't even know how focused I want to be on submitting poems to magazines... But I figured probably better to keep more options open for future-me just in case...

My mid-term presentation of the project! featuring:

wip mid-term artist statement

hastily printed out photos I was thinking of using in the final book

big bunch of poems to potentially use in the final book that I picked from my poem drafts that I keep in my notes app

that red book with a circle window I made for another class (just to practice case bookbinding) as an example of a window cut into the cover

lil white book in the back that was our class' "Seeded Notebook" assignment which was essentially a moodboard for our project

a mockup that had the idea for a hidden accordion fold page (the concept being that it would spill out of the book unexpectedly while you were flipping through it)!! kinda sad I didn't have time to add that into the final but boy o boy did I run out of time lol

Did u know I was gonna put illustrations!! into the final book as well! and while I had some fun making them and using my ipad as a makeshift light table and using my new fountain pen (oough don't get me started I've been on a fountain pen kick lately)... Ultimately I felt I 1. didn't have time to include them in a resolved enough way and 2. they felt kinda outta place from the photos and poems

Some inspirations during my researchy/brainstorming phase that I got from my school's artist's book collection!:

the cover of Water, Gold, Soil by Sayler/Morris, which got me hooked on the idea of putting a photo slightly embedded into the cover (doesn't it look so good on that book!!??)

Aunt Sallie's Lament by Margaret Kaufman, featuring these wild progression of increasingly smaller pages that change how you read the poem; nothing specific I took from this book tbh but was cool to look at lol

And you know I gotta look at Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer for a book with window cuts!! I soon realized It's only printed one-sided, which meant they didn't have to worry about how it would affect any text on the verso page. Which is like, fair enough for them they had a whole NOVEL of words to deal with lmao

I made my own book cloth for this project!! sort of!! I feel like I was doing something wrong, the interfacing I got wasn't really sticking to the fabric very well at times ????? Was kinda finicky not sure if I was doing something wrong during ironing... But I got to go into the fabric store and find the exact shade of pink I wanted for the cover C:

Did 3 small cover tests too (as per assignment requirements lol but also they were kinda helpful). Takeaway was that I didn't like how test 2 and 3 looked lol

AND HERE'S ME TRYING TO FIGURE OUT AND GET IDEAS FOR WINDOW CUTS. THIS PHASE WAS ACTUALLY EXTREMELY HELFUL because at the time i was SO stuck for ideas I'm not kidding I'm was STRUGGLING throughout this entire project from a conceptual standpoint. For some reason the thesis, the bones just weren't solidified in my head, and it kinda stayed that way until almost the very end when I was formatting the poems esp the rainbow poem. But I think it clarified completely once I thought of the title, which just kinda stepped into my brain after writing one of the poems (which has the line "there are good things yet to come") and then I was like I need a book title... and my brain did a few hops and there it was LOL and I'm so happy with the title :') it captures the main theme with a lot of nuance in a pretty simple phrase which is HOO boy chefs kiss and hard to come by haha I felt very lucky

Printing was also a pain because the print techs at my school misunderstood what I was trying to do (and I'm extra salty because I was right in the first place and they made me second guess myself cause they said they needed it formatted a different way!!! But in the end I was right the first time!!!) Siigh whateevsss the silver lining was that I did notice some things I needed to fix before printing anyways... Anyways I was trying to format it their way and I fucked it all up lol I was printing a b/w mockup on my own and despairing cause I thought I was gonna have to redo all my formatting (which, with WINDOW cuts which makes every page before/after matter a LOT felt like a nightmare)

But again I was right the first time lol so crisis averteddd just a lil spike in stress levels lol

Used the digital stack cutter on my own for the first time and ohh my goodness... I love my old manual big guillotine cutter but this guy. this guy was pretty cool look at his cool line of light that tells you where the blade is gonna hit

After agonizing so much over the concept and content I was sooo happy to just be Physcially Putting The Book Together, a real turn my brain off and just do him activity yaaay

This was my fun lil set up, I was recently given this bright light stand thingy which was actually so helpful lol; I like my dim cozy room light but it's not the best for Seeing what you're doing for art stuff

So much window cutting... Yes I just freehanded all round edges lol verryy carefully.. Some alignement issues but minor enough to not affect readability ^^

For example in these first two images with the star, I just ended up cutting off the misaligned cut-lines which made the star a lil bigger lol; was trickier with a star shape like that vs like a rectangle though because of how many vertices it had, aka more opportunities to fuck up the shape

Binding time!! look at that satisfying stack oouh yummy.. Also featuring my big slab of marble that's very heavy and works great to weigh down during drying lol. Also yes I put ziplog bags between the end pages and book block to protect against glue dampness because I've gotten spooked by how damp my Hazelnuts Grow on Trees book got when clamping it lmao

Some page alignment issues with the windows after binding but nothing major :)

[mysticdragon3art]

Pegoryu Week 2022 day 3: Sports AU. OTPtember 2022 day 20. Ryuji about the pass the blitzball for Akira's kick.

I recently drew some Final Fantasy X fanart, so the only sport on my mind recently has been Blitzball. Even though I've never played FFX, so I'm not entirely sure if I'm depicting it correctly. lol

Doodled 9/21/2022. Pilot Petit fountain pen using Monteverde "Charoite" ink. Colored with Copic markers. Clean-up on Krita.