Little red book (work in progress)

 book, personal, photos, work in progress  7 Responses »
May 062013
 

book screen capture cover
For years on one of my HDDs I’ve been  keeping  a folder titled Little red book. It is filled with with hundreds of self-portraits taken over last five years. I made the folder  to collect some of my favorite selfies and it served a purpose of being sort of a virtual visual diary.  I can’t remember why I named it Little red book, I guess it just sounded cool. Last few days, as I was backing up some of my files I found the folder again and an idea dawned on me- why not put together a little book of self-portraits? Most of the pictures I took during last five years are digital and I haven’t been making many prints ( I don’t think I made any prints of my self-portraits  at all, maybe just a few at a request of my family :)) so it would be nice to actually have some of them printed, to have them on paper.

As I was going through photos I took over last five year I got a bit sentimental. Shooting self portraits has been a big part of my creative expression  over the past  10 years. I was thinking I should maybe  put together a book of selfies taken during the past decade but most of my pictures taken from 2003.-2008. are stored on DVDs and CDs and my laptop refuses to read them. But if a freind borrows me her computer book of 10 years of selfies might still happen. Even if it doesn’t I’m still satisfied with putting together selected images from last five years.

computer screen

Anyway, I’ve been very consistent in shooting selfies all through my twenties, it’s how I learned about myself and about photography as well. Now, I feel my attitude towards photography as well as my interests are changing and putting together this little book feels very cathartic, like I’m releasing a part of my personal history and making room for new experiences! It feels great.

As you can see from these screen captures, this booklet is still a work in progress. It’s a bit challenging to pick out favorite images from thousands and thousands I took over the years so by the time I’m done with selecting photos and editing this book might look completely different than current selection :)

I’m planning to finish this fun project till mid June and then I’ll write another post about it or maybe present it in a short video so you can see how it turened out. I’m not planning to make this book public I’m doing it just for myself to have as  a memento and a reference point for future photo project as well as a reminder of my very humble, modest , sometimes awkward but very fun beginnings in photography :)

book screen capture002

Postcards from Zagreb, photo book

 book, collaboration, photos  3 Responses »
Nov 112012
 

photo book cover

When Arlen and I met and when he first visited Croatia few years ago I was very happy to show him around Zagreb. We took long walks in city downtown and I showed  him all the popular tourist sights  as well as my favorite places. In a way I felt like I was rediscovering my own city and I started taking a bunch of pictures. First I just took photos to make memories of the times we spent together  but with time I got more and more interested in documenting the city, its streets and architecture.

When Arlen came to one of his visits this Summer I was in a phase of starting to shoot film again, mostly using Minolta X-GM he brought me last Winter. I asked him if he would be interested in  being my accomplice in shooting analog and  maybe doing a photo collaboration. He agreed and we spent almost entire September and October documenting streets of Zagreb on film. He used Nikon N80 and I snapped with said Minolta and Superheadz Ultra Wide and Slim toy camera using mostly expired Kodak film.

We decided it would be fun to put our pictures into a book which we called Postcards from Zagreb. Since it was our personal project, at first I thought to make it private but we had  so much fun shooting and putting together a book that I had to share it :)

You can flip through the pages of our joint photo project here.

Also you can see more of my own  (and some of Arlen’s ) analog photos on my tumblr.

photo book

photo book

zg collage

I made another scrapbook!

 art project, book, collage, DIY, drawings, work in progress  12 Responses »
May 312012
 

artsy scrapbook
I made another artsy scrapbook! With the first one I made, my main goal was to practice storytelling through photos. With this one I had only one thing in mind: to get messy! To be more specific, I wanted to take a break from accuracy and create something very fast without too much thinking. I had no idea what I wanted the final result to look like, turning the process of making this booklet into an exercise of listening to my intuition and feeling the work more instead of thinking about it and planning.

I called this scrapbook 10 drawings (a bit by mistake since  pages are mixed media collages, oooooops, but who really cares?) You can see pages below (on left I scribbled a title of images that are on the right) or scroll down to see the process of making the book.

scrapbook pages

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Here’s the process of making the booklet:

tools for making a scrapbook

First, I prepared tools I intended on using: paper cutter, thread, brushes, pens, glue, paint, paper and two pieces of card board I already cut into 15×15 cm size and decided to use them as book cover and back. I also peeled off the outer layer of cardboard to reveal texture beneath it which I quite liked.

scrapbook wip

After that I cut 10 pieces of paper and continued working on cover and back that were originally a part of an ugly box. So I torn out few pages out of an old textbook and glued them onto cardboard. After that they got repainted.

textures

I randomly smeared some acrylic paint on pieces of paper I would use as book pages to get nice textures as drawing backgrounds. Then I added some cut out textbook pages.

scrapbook collage
After all drawings were finished I bound the book using the needle and thread. It was most challenging part of making this scrapbook mostly because I have no idea how to bind books, heheh. I have been watching a lot of videos on how to do that and reading tutorials but I’m more interested in creating content for books then learning technicalities of binding them so learning that skill will have to wait.

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I’m already planning my next scrapbook , it will be a mix of photos and drawings. What is your next art/craft  project?

Experimenting with scrap-booking

 art project, book, DIY, personal, photos  5 Responses »
Apr 272012
 

scrapbook01
Recently I made my very first scrapbook ever. I really felt like doing something a bit different than my usual style and I felt like experimenting. And indeed this book turned out quite unlike my other work, both in concept and execution. It turned out to be a simple  exercise in visual storytelling of sorts.

Ok, let’s start from beginning. I knew I wanted to put together a simple scrapbook and I knew I wanted to utilize my old analog photos in it. But just gluing photos on book pages wasn’t enough especially because photos themselves (although simple) were evocative of certain moods. So, I decided to intuitively associate  one word with  each picture without thinking too much. First words that came to mind were: dream, warmth, memory, remember, reverie, passage, nostalgia, moody, silence and timeless. I wrote the words on a typewriter and printed out dictionary definitions of the words and paired them with photos. I wanted to create a dreamy mood while keeping the book minimalistic so I used white background for pages and light blue for back and cover.

Here is the result (also scroll down if you want to see the actual work-in-progress pics):

scrapbook02
scrapbook03
scrapbook04
scrapbook05
scrapbook06
scrapbook07
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scrapbook09

 Ok, and this is how I actually made the book. First I got myself nice, big box and cut 15x15cm cardboard pieces. I painted each piece white on both sides using acrylic paint (except book cover and back which I painted blueish). I choose photos I wanted to use and cut them so they can fit on my square format pages. I glued them on pages and then punched holes in cardboard so I can bind them. After this was done, I added words, more paint and ink stains on each page to make the whole book intentionally messier and totally imperfect.

The whole process of making this scrapbook was very intuitive and a great exercise to put me in mood for telling stories and setting moods through photographs which  I’ve  been doing for my actual photo book (I mentioned it here before) that should be out in December 2012.

 

Flower Garden, book preview

 book, drawings, illustration, publishing  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

flower garden

Hello Spring! I have a new series of drawings dedicated to Springtime, flowers and flower garden and I put them, all 33 of them into a little, cute book. I will dedicate another big post to this book, for now I’m leaving you with a link to a  book preview.

 

Photo diary: drawing on an apron, brooches from Macedonia and thoughts on self-publishing

 book, DIY, drawings, illustration, musings, photos, work in progress  18 Responses »
Mar 092012
 

Hello Friday! It’s that time of the week when I share my personal, daily photos with you. Last week I took you to a walk through Zagreb downtown but this week I’ll share a glimpse into some of my creative endeavors.

So, sometimes I paint and draw on aprons yet somehow I never remember to take photos of my creations. So this time, when drawing on an apron I decided to photograph the entire process (as well as finished result of course).

<>sketch on an apron
I did this apron for Maja, so I tried to come up with a drawing she might like. I decided on a little house and a home sweet home sign. First I did a sketch on fabric using my trusty uni-ball roller.

wip drawing on an apron
After that I painted the outlines using black textile paint and thin brushes. After the paint was dry I added purple details using Kuretake ZIG farbicolor pen. I got this pen from Arlen, it’s really great to draw with, it has twin brushes  and like the black paint I used it’s permanent on fabrics after ironing. Unfortunate Kuretake pens are not available in Croatia.

finished apron
This is how the apron looks finished and worn! I also made a little wooden friend to go with the apron. I hope Maja will like it.

drenka's brooches
A couple a days ago I got two lovely flower brooches from Drenka who took part in my swap! You can check out her blog here.

life is beautiful
inside of the book
And yet another thing came in the mail this week, a copy of my book Life Is Beautiful. What’s  the deal with that now, you might ask. Well, I put together a booklet of some of my older illustrations using lulu.com. I wanted to test their service, quality of their printing and shipping options. I self-published my first book via blurb.com and now I wanted to try something else. I must admit I love Lulu! Prints of my illos turned out beautifully, colors are gorgeous and paper on which they print is high quality. Their site is easy to use and they offer many,many more options than blurb. However, international shipping prices are really expensive and that is the main reason (well probably the only reason ) I will publish my next book via blurb. Why do shipping prices matter to me? Well, from my experience with the first book, many people wanted to buy a signed copy of the book directly from me instead of ordering it directly from blurb (which I totally understand). So, I had to order my books (that are printed and delivered from Netherlands) to Croatia, sign them and then ship them again to their new home making the whole process much pricier than it should be.
Anyway, I really love lulu.com and I hope they find a way to make their international shipping less expensive.

i love photography canvas
I finished this little painting (5×5 inch) last week but I haven’t took photos of it until today. What to say,I love photography!

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I wish you all wonderful weekend and see you all on Monday when my SUPER SWEET PRINT SALE starts :)

Unconditional Joy and kids

 book  4 Responses »
Nov 192011
 

book kids04

I’d like to share something really cute with you! Yesterday evening I got these photos in my inbox.  These are pictures of kindergarten kids posing with my book and illustrations!  The photos  were taken by Maja, their teacher (and I’m posting these images with her permission) . Aren’t they cute? And Maja is obviously a very creative photographer and an awesome teacher :)

book kids

book kids01

book kids03

Call me

 book, illustration  2 Responses »
Nov 092011
 

call me
*Call me*
The phone is really cool. And so am I. And you are too.

This is a slightly different version of an illustration from my book.

Also, if you’re interested in buying my book (or books :)) blurb.com offers a promo code BIGTEN that you can use at checkout and receive 10$ discount. The offer is valid until Nov 30th on minimum purchase of $29.95.
Just saying’
:D

Unconditional Joy, my first book!

 book  7 Responses »
Oct 282011
 

I’m very happy to announce that I’ve just published my first book, a collection of 72 illustrations called Unconditional Joy. You can preview and buy book here.

My first book :)

This is what I wrote in the book intro:
An idea of putting together a collection of my illustrations first popped into my head in March 2011. My initial thought was to publish a book composed of work I made from 2009. to 2011. but the more I thought of it the more I actually wanted to make original drawings specifically for this project and I also wanted the illustrations for the book to be connected through a certain theme, not just a series of drawings randomly put together. Since my biggest inspiration comes from nature I decided that the main theme of the book would be loosely based on seasons, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.

Even though most pieces were made specifically for the book they still feature familiar characters and motives I developed in last couple of years. As you flip through the pages you’ll notice fox and woodland animals, jellyfish, happy elephants, little houses and big flowers, bears and other animals that populate all of my illustration work ever since I started developing my style back in 2009.

This book is not only a collection of drawings, in a way it’s a collection of my experiences, ideas and designs and it represents everything I’ve learned as an illustrator in past few years.
It’s also the end of one creative journey in which I set out to find my path as an illustrator as it is the start of a new one. A creative journey I’ve been enjoying tremendously and I hope you will enjoy the results of it as well.

the book!!

Here are some of my favorite pages from the book:

page retro
page foxes
page elephants
page bears

I really loved working on this book and can’t wait to make a next one :)

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