Traveler's Guide to East Texas

This is an accordion-bound small book. The pages are an abstraction of a map, painted in water color on Fabriano Bright 180lb paper. The text is stamped with black ink, and is intentionally a bit off-kilter. The covers are book board and yellow Thai Mulberry paper. This is the piece that I am submitting to the Adams County Art Council annual juried show.

It's a little different from what the ACAC show usually has, and it's actually getting pretty competitive so I am not sure what my chances are. I had originally planned on making a watercolor painting but while I worked on it all I could think of was what a cool book I could make from the image. I already had the boards cut and all the supplies I would need to make it into a book, and I had an idea for the covers, so at the last minute, after the painting was completed, I decided to do the book instead. It was hard to cut the painting -- one mistake and all the work was for nothing, and it's just weird to take a completed painting and chop it in half. But once I did it I knew I had made the right choice because I am happier with the book than I was with the painting.

The cool thing about accordion binding is that you can view the pages as if they are pages, or spread the whole thing out as if it were a single image.



The cover on this book is similar to the one on the blue chicken book -- I carved a design into the bookboard, then covered with a Thai mulberry paper.