Book Arts

I teach a year-long (two semester) Design class at Arcadia High School. I love this class dearly because--as already professed--I am a DESIGNER. And I love all things design! 

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It's an introductory course, and we cover a little bit of a lot of areas: Design Thinking, Design as Communication, Graphic Design, Typography, Illustration, Product and Packaging Design, Interior Design, Animation and Character Design, and Jewelry Design. Students interest in Fashion Design or UX Design can choose projects with those emphases for their final project. It's also an introductory art course, so the elements and principles of art, the acquisition of foundational artmaking skill sets, and exposure to/practice with multiple art media are additionally part of the curriculum.

 

As I am the only teacher of this particular course, I write all the curriculum. And as our only digital tools in the physical classroom are the student chromebooks, we do everything analog! (excepting those students who have personal tablets and can/prefer to work digitally) -And I love it! Foundational, hands-on drawing, color-mixing etc. skills are vital to understanding their digital counterparts. AND... basically the whole point of this website is to proclaim and affirn the importance of tactile engagement, so I'm stoked that I have the "excuse" to have my students produce design projects by hand, old-school!

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so... how do BOOK ARTS fit in?

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Partly, as a fun and engaging craft exercise to break up larger/longer project periods. I've done a number of simple bookbinding activities with my Design students over the years, but the most successful (and the most appealing to my students, and twith the most impressive results) are CASCADING BOOKS and TUNNEL BOOKS.

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TUNNEL BOOKS ... are the big project we do for the Illustration unit, with its focus on book illustration. Rather than have them simply do a book cover or interior illustration, they combine the book illustration itself with book arts (so meta!), in essence creating a small art book to tell the story about the book, using art (again-- so meta!). The tunnel book project teaches basic art skills as well-- before we start the project, they first learn about the principle of depth, and the various ways to create the illusion of 3D depth in a 2D medium (including technical perspective).  They achieve depth two-fold with the tunnel book: first, because the layers literally ARE a foreground, middle-ground, and background, and when the book is closed, depth is achieved by overlapping and position and size; and second, through the physical (and literal 3D) extension of the accordions. 

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More than that, though... it's a FUN way to create an illustration! It's not easy, as this type of binding requires precision, a lot of decision-making, and problem-solving. But that's what they need! And it's working with your hands, and it requires good craftsmanship, and there is a lot of choice involved. All good things! AND-- the payout is great, at the end! They look SO COOL, and as it's a different kind of craft or drawing approach than people are used to (and definitely a different book approach), the finished product is so impressive! (Two years running, now, in fact... a tunnel book has been the recipient of the Principal's Choice Award at our annual high school art exhibition!)

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And the CASCADING BOOK? Is one of my "Friday Design Challenge(s)"-- in this case a beginning, fun little bookbinding project to introduce my students to book anatomy, book arts, paper-folding, and cover-making skills! (note: both of these structures are takeaways from the Book Arts class I took while in grad school!)

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