In the High School Book Arts class, my students combine traditional bookmaking techniques with digital technologies to create books that are autobiographical or reflective of their family history. They may be baby books, collections of family recipes, or books in which students explore their cultural backgrounds. Though students work with digital tools, they continue to experience the process of making something by hand, and it is the mark of the artist's hand that I enjoy preserving in computer-manipulated art.
Students make each element of their books: they make their own paper, design the pages and sew them together, and finally, add a hardbound cover with endpapers of their own design. I encourage students to explore ways in which they can use scanners and Photoshop to manipulate the contents of their books.
Using scanners, students incorporate precious childhood and family artifacts, recording memories while leaving the original and often fragile objects intact. Students scan family photographs, their childhood drawings, or their first writings. I encourage them to use the literal fabric of their life: baby clothes, a parent's wedding veil, an ancestor's needlework, a handkerchief, or a piece of lace as a starting point for their project. Some students choose to print their images and work back into them with colored pencils, collage, and stitching.
Some students use Photoshop to plan the colors of an image or to visualize a color separation for a print. They may alter the scale or color to change the mood. Students also use the software as a compositional tool to combine scans of photographs and artifacts.
Manipulating the opacity of layers in Photoshop allow students to easily collage these images in new ways.
Compositional
Students also use Photoshop to design the individual pages of their books, often layering their images with text. Text may come from family interviews or childhood memories. They may also incorporate handwriting from family recipes or letters. Students have used old-fashioned typewriters and also generated their own fonts.
The end result is enduring, evocative, and highly personal.