Personal Histories 

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Project Prompt

​​You will be making your first book as a loose personal historical document. Consider chronicling some aspect of your interests, heritage, past landscapes, dreams, hopes, fears, or facts in an artistic, non-conventional way. You may use image and/or text in whatever form you like. Think about cropping images, panning-in close up, zooming out, showing different details as you flip through the pages. Do images span across an entire spread? Bleed to the edges? These may be xeroxed copies of original artwork, or perhaps the originals are bound into a book. Perhaps the book form itself is sculptural or autobiographical. Consider collages, drawings, paintings, or type-written, digitally created images or hand-printed if you have the resources and know-how.

Guidelines

Book Structure: Your choice.
Final book size: Your choice
Number of Page Spreads: At least 6. Consider adding an introductory sequence w/ title page and a colophon at the end.
Image and/or text: No restrictions
Color: Your choice
Paper: Your choice
Printing/reproduction: Your choice
Edition size: Your choice, editioned or a unique book.

• Brainstorm ideas about how to convey something about yourself in a less literal, traditional and more artistic way. Will you use photographs, collage? Will you draw or paint? Perhaps you could use a series of objects that are scanned or photographed that represent you in some profound way. Are the pages rendered to mimic some sort of game? Will you have words or images on the back side?
• Try to steer away from photographic or scrap book autobiography or mini art portfolio, remember, this is an artist book not a photo album! Be narrative! Try to create a cinematic experience.
• Narrow it down to one or two ideas and develop a sketch and/or a dummy. Sketch it out on paper. Make it to scale. Consider working with cut text and image pieces and rearranging them on the pages to try different compositions out. Play around with the technique you are considering. Bring those experiments and dummies to class to show during our in-progress critiques.
• If Xeroxing copies of your original artwork, I recommend creating it full size, so you can easily print it. Take into consideration any margin or bleed restrictions with the printer. It might be easier to leave margins on the page and trim.
• What kind of paper will you use? You might consider going to Kelly Paper to purchase 80 lb. 11 x 17 color paper, asking for photo paper at Kinkos or Alphagraphics, or cutting down some paper to size that could accommodate Xerox printing. Thicker papers can be difficult to fold without scoring. Also look out for paper grain, create a dummy to make sure your paper will lay flat after folding.

Grading

20 Points Total
5 Conceptual development/Dummy
5 Design
5 Craftsmanship
5 Completion

Timeline
2.17/ Critique

Artist Examples

Past Student Examples