A Book just for You my Darling

Happy Leap Day!

My new art journal is an altered book again. This one is a little smaller than my previous very big and chunky Cut and Paste Journal. I thrifted this book a few years ago, and until now it has just been sitting in my stash of books to cut up or use in some way.

So this year I decided to commit to it, and give it a go. By the way, it’s very pink…

The original text book is called Boken till dig (A Book for You) and it’s written by Swedish author Kerstin Thorvall (1925 - 2010) back in 1959. It is aimed at helping young girls become women, with advice on how to eat, dress, behave (especially around b-o-y-s) and take care of themselves. It is written from a stand-point of love and a heartfelt desire to help teens become themselves, but unfortunately the advice is contradictory and not always correct, so I have no qualms (not that I would anyway) to be painting over its pages. Plus today the advice is rather old-fashioned and at times a bit misogynistic, so that helps too.

But anyway, enough about the text that we won’t be reading anyway, and let’s have a look at the design of this book before I start using it.

I was thrilled when I discovered a beautiful pink and green pattern (with the title in gold on the spine) under the dust-jacket. Isn’t it sooo pretty?

I will most definitely not do anything to the outer cover. I’m just going to leave it as is and enjoy it. I’m dedicating the book to myself, so the title will still be fitting with the new content I’ll be adding (my art).

I’m thinking lots of green and pink pages – a favorite color combo around here.

The illustrations are black line-drawings with one printed high-light color (magenta pink!) in some places. I think they are so chic and cool. I might not be able to cover up a single one of them, but that will have to be okay too. I’ll find a “work around” I guess.

The pages are rather thin, compared to the kind of books I usually pick to alter, but that’s because I picked this one for the cover, the illustrations and the size (the pages are almost square) and not the thickness of the pages which is normally my most important requirement when I pick a text book to use as a journal. But what are rules for, if not to break them? Or at least I think it is good to branch out of your comfort-zone and test previous assumptions on “what works” and what kind of paper you “must have” in order to be happy. Sometimes those assumptions or rules you made up are indeed true, and  sometimes they are not.

Anyway, I can’t wait to show you how this books develops. A book for You(rself) (or: me) – a title I think is fitting for any journal.

[tweet “A journal is a gift for ourselves, now as well as to our future selves and our memory… /iHanna”]