When we went to the library to select books, I was largely unsure about what I wanted to do with the assignment. What I realized after a while, however, was that what I was really looking at and getting interested in was the covers of books. Since I didn’t really know about the content of any of these books, I was able to look at the covers merely as images. This gave me the idea of focusing on the covers themselves, and trying to create a project that connected the images of the covers.
When I got all my books together and brought them back home, I tried to figure out a way to connect them. I had a bunch of different ideas, from making a sort of giant book out of the covers to making a sort of sequenced visual film strip by placing them after one another. I didn’t like the results of these attempts, and decided what I should do was take the covers off and combine them into a sort of photobook of covers.
I was talking to Chris and he mentioned how an english major he knew was shocked at my idea to destroying so many books just for the covers. I hadn’t really stepped back and thought about this, but I instantly realized I didn’t want to destroy so many books for the project. As I sat in class thinking about how to get around this, I realized that I had already put the covers in a form that would allow me to make a project without destroying them - I had taken a picture of each book so I could easily sequence them in class. I decided I would make a book out of the photos of the covers.
With this in mind I spent the class looking at the different visual connections about how to sequence the photos of the covers. I tried a few different things but then realized that one of the covers was partially titled Cross Currents (the full title was Cross Currents of the South). This gave me the idea of blending together different parts of the covers in photoshop to create a sequence of images that sort of flows back and forth between covers and breaks up the natural separation they have as covers of individual books.
Once I created an outline for my sequence of blended images I started photoshopping. I had experience altering and combining images from Intro to Digital Art, so I based what I did initially on the techniques I knew from that class, mainly selecting out parts of one cover and combing them onto another. I had lots of fun doing this, tweaking the different ways the separate images went together. When I got a little farther along, I realized I wanted to do something that Professor Friebele showed us but that I hadn’t done on my own project, which was to warp part of the image on a 3D plane. After a bit of messing around I was able to do this and use it on several images.
When I went further, I started to think about how I would make the book an object. I decided that I wanted it to still have the weight and feel of a cover, and realized cardboard would be the best base for the photos. At this point I also realized that not only could the images connect by sequencing after each other as they were on my computer, but in the book form they could connect when two images were viewed at once (when the book was open) and by mirroring one of the front covers on back covers. With this in mind I tried to create new connections in photoshop that worked with this form.
After finishing the project and showing it in class I was largely happy with the final product. I think the different images sequence together well and the cardboard worked well as a base for them to sort of mimic the feel of covers. The one thing I wish I would have done that I thought of after the fact was paint the sides of the cardboard to look like pages inside of a book to emphasize the idea that my book was combining these separate books and covers. However, I still think the project was successful and gave me a lot of good experience both with the overall concept of sequencing images and with using photoshop and the book object form as a means to enhance this.
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