The Book of Marks - Inside Front Cover and First Page Reveal

The book structure is based on Teesha Moore's Amazing Journal  It measures approximately 8 in. x 10 in. Moore's book uses one sheet of Fabrianon Artistico paper. The paper used during Jacqueline Sullivan's Book of Marks class was one sheet of Strathmore 400 140 lb. watercolor paper.

This is what you see when you first open the book.

The inside cover has a flap. There are several pages with flaps which makes the book interactive. Though if you don't like these short pages, you can always tear them off. Here and there we punched holes in the book for a peek-a-boo effect.

Under the flap, I glued a strip of the black paper with white marks and wrote the title of the class and dates with a white Gelly Roll pen. I left the inside cover blank as I'm undecided whether to fill all the surfaces. If you look at a commercially printed book, the inside cover is usually blank

Jaqueline suggested the subject matter of the book be about art. In the handouts she had given us quotes about art from artists, writers. We were free to chose our own subject, but I liked a lot of the quotes so decided make the book about art. I printed the quotes out on some colored paper that matched the colors in the book.

Besides the quotes, we could also fill the book with collage and Ascemic writing. Collage is a bit out of the box for me. It's hard to know whether there are too many bits or not enough. Does it look pleasing or like the cat barfed on the floor?

 From Jacqueline's notes about ascemic writing, "Ascemic writing is a wordless form of writing. The word ascemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning." With the non-specifity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art."

Jacqueline had 4 ways of doing ascemic writing. One was a word per line which would also make the writing/printing very legible. I chose this method for the first quote I used which is the definition of Kung Fu. "Kung Fu is any discipline or skill achieved through hard work and practice." (Kung Fu is not restricted to the Martial Arts. Pretty much anything we do art, craft, baking, practicing medicine, law, music, is Kung Fu.) 

When I studied Martial Arts, the color red was reserved for the Masters (5th degree and up Black Belt). So I used a cardinal stamp to reflect this. As it turns out, purple and blue are two of the lower rank belt colors in the karate system I practiced.