Artist Book

My Artist Book is about my trip to China in January 2012 with my high school. 14 students and 3 teachers went on the trip. Our primary focus whilst in China was to volunteer at China Little Flower orphanage in Beijing, where they look after particularly sick babies and children from other orphanages in Beijing.  My specific point of interaction is the meals that we had in China, as this was when we would discuss what had happened throughout our day and how we were feeling especially after visiting the baby home (orphanage).

My book format is an album. The album format helps to communicate the passing of days, as it is similar to a photo album, or diary that is used to record a period of time. Within the book each set of three pages represents 2 days of the trip. The first page has the 2 Chinese characters for the number of these days. The second page has quotes and thoughts from the days, things that we found interesting or strange, the general discussion of the day. The third page is a collage of food that we ate or implements that we used. On this page surrounding the illustration are the more serious thoughts about the day, cut into the page, in particular thoughts about the baby home and how it effected us.

I chose collage as my illustration technique because it is an illustration technique that I am fairly confident in (now) and I wanted the book to have a tactile and hand-made quality about it, to connect with the content and the reader. Also because the content is very personal, I wanted the illustrations to be accessible to the reader and not alienate them, and I thought that collage would be an effective way of getting that across.

I chose to include text and so much of it because; when we were in China there was a constant discussion and conversation. The content of this varied from how freezing cold it was, to the strange things that we saw, to deeper discussions that we would have sometimes late into the night about how working in the baby home was effecting us and how we were feeling about the whole trip. In my book I wanted to convey this constant conversation and the different levels of conversation. On the second pages with text printed on acetate, the idea is to convey the crazy and strange things that we saw and the general surface discussion of the day, the weather, and the sights we saw. It is printed in an almost haphazard way, because that was how our conversations would go, and it was a crazy time with a lot to take in, and I am trying to illustrate that through the placement of the text. The more important text cut into the same page as the illustration because these are the more important thoughts that were always with us, no matter where we were, these are the things that have really stuck with me since the trip. I chose to the Chinese characters for the numbers of the days, because whilst in China we all learnt to count in Chinese, and when we were out at the tourist destinations we would count off as a group to make sure we were all together, and we decided early on that we should count in Chinese. It is a combination of that memory and the want to include the culture and language into my book.