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

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?

Doodling flowers, work in progress video

 drawings, video  6 Responses »
Apr 122012
 

doodling flowers from Asja Boros on Vimeo.

This is  short (and abruptly cut -I forgot to charge my camera battery, oooooops :)) video of me doodling some flowers.

I’m still trying to figure out how to shoot videos of my drawings in progress, trying to use better lighting, thinking at which angle to shoot, how to position my camera, so please bare with me and my ongoing experiments (such as this) till I get it right :)

You can see the finished drawing below, it looks  much different than original doodle. I have made an original sketch with Artline 0.1 pen (sent to me by Bob), coloring was done wit uni-ball vision fine tip black pen and watercolors in pencil. The drawing was done on 180gms slightly textured paper and it’s approximately 21×28 cm in size ( I cropped A4 format a bit).

drawing wip

drawing framed

drawing framed

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 :)

Linocut textures

 work in progress  4 Responses »
Nov 172011
 

linocut
Here is one of my latest work-progress-projects: making colorful textures using lino-cut technique. I made random cuts and scratches on a piece of lino using a sharp knife to get messy texture and them made many different prints using various ink colors. The size of watercolor paper prints were made on is 25×35 cm.

I plan on using those textures as backgrounds for drawings.

linocut textures

linocut backgrounds01

linocut backgrounds03

linocut floor

Simple ideas

 drawings  3 Responses »
Jun 292011
 

Sometimes when I don’t have time to seriously draw I doodle simple (usually abstract) shapes, scan and color them and save in one of my “work in progress” folders. Usually I find those simple drawings useful as additional layers when composing my illustrations.

( If you’re interested about the way I make my illustrations you can read about it here.)
So here are few of those simple doodles I made lately which may or may not end up as part of actual illustrations : )

abstract idea

hearts

abstract idea

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