One-Paper Wonders: Painting and Folding a Unique Art Book

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone, and welcome to One Paper Wonders, painting and folding a unique art book. In this class, we'll take a single piece of watercolor paper and transform it into a custom sketchbook or art book. I'm Denise Love, an artist and creative educator, and I'm excited to bring you this fun and creative dive into handmade art journals. You'll learn how to layer watercolor and mixed media, add mark making for texture, and use simple folding and cutting techniques to create a functional and artistic book. This is a great way to explore your creativity while making something truly unique. So let's get started. William 2. Class Project: Your class project, you will create a unique sketchbook or art book using a single piece of watercolor paper. Start by painting your large sheet with any supplies you feel inspired to use. Once your paper is complete, use one of the folding and cutting methods demonstrated in the class to turn it into a functional book. Share the photos of your painted paper in the final book to showcase your process and finish project with the class. 3. Supplies: Let's take a look at our supplies in this video. You've got some very basic supplies that you need, and then any art materials that you own are up for grabs. I like having a ruler, good sized ruler, so I can use this to cut straight edges and my utility knife. I've got a ruler and a utility knife. You'll need a pair of scissors, possibly. I like having a bowl and folder. If you don't have a bone folder, you could use the back of a spoon so go get a big spoon and you can use a spoon to basically hit your corners and your edges of your paper to fold them, and then I'm using a glue stick. You're welcome to use whatever glue you have on hand. I just think this is fast and easy and convenient. I've got the oh glue stick, and I'm using a large piece of watercolor paper, and depending on what size book you make, you can get these any size you want. I've done several with the really big size watercolor paper, 18 by 24. But because the paper is too big to really show you what I'm folding in class, I'm going to work on the one size smaller for a few in class. This is the 12 by 18, I'm just working on the Canson watercolor paper because those are some pads of big paper that I have. If you've got a favorite paper that you like to work on and you're willing to create some of these on your favorite paper, then go for that. You just need something big. And we'll take a look at how to fold two different types of books. So I'm going to create more than one painted sheet. So I want you to experiment and play, take as long as you want on each piece of paper, go as fast as you want. Slow as you want. We're going to end up. This is the big piece I've prepared to fold another book because I was playing in different color palettes. So this is an excellent way to play with color palettes, and this is the great big sheet. You see how it does all the way, fit on there. But basically, you're going to paint and play and smear things and mark make until you're like, oh, I think I'm ready to fold a book. That's the goal. It doesn't have to be beautiful because when we get our book folded and the reason why I like to make these is because we end up with some very interesting, cool compositions and things that we wouldn't have created. Once we've got our book made, then we can go back in and do any additional mark making or collaging or anything like that. But you end up with some really cool, interesting, surprising bits that you just never expected. So this is going to be fun. I cannot wait to start painting with you and just give you that little look at these. The second one I've put a cover on. That cover could be a piece of handmade paper. It could be a piece of art that you painted just to loop around it. We're going to make at least two books in class, this one, and this one. So I want you to paint a bunch of paper. I want you just to have fun and play with color palettes and marks and just see what you can create. You're looking to create a great big just mess. Basically, it's not anything to get stressed about, and then once you've got it painted and dried, we'll be ready to fold, let's go on to the painting. 4. Painting First Layer On Your Paper: This video, let's start painting our sheets of paper and I start off with a layer of whatever paint I want to begin with. In my case, it's going to be watercolor paper. You're welcome to paint your layers with any supplies you have on hand, whether that be a watercolor or an acrylic paint, I might do one with acrylic paint just to do something different. But the first one I'm going to do is going to be with watercolor. I've picked out the Kurataki paints because I love them. I've got the art nouveau and the 48 piece set, and I pulled these colors out of both of these. I've just picked some random colors, which I know, right? I love picking a color palette, but let's just pick some random colors. Then you might see why I pick a color palette. Four oh two Mrs yellow, 54 olive green, 44 yellow ochre, 17 coral pink, and 47 raw umber. They were earthy. I thought, that might be fun. I'm going to paint the whole thing. I'm wanting things that will dry fairly quickly so that I have to set these to the side while they're drying later and use different brushes, make different marks. Let me move my cutting pad out of the way here. The goal is to fill the page in whatever way you are inspired to do. It doesn't have to be anything specific. It can be different shapes, which I'm filling shapes. For some reason, I'm loving the little rainbow shape recently, so I might put some rainbows on mine. It's your time to experiment with your brushes and see if you can get them to make fun marks and different things depending on how wet or dry the brush is. If you like botanical work, throw some flowers in there. Um so I could actually do that now that I've said that just to play it up and be a little different than anything that I've done recently. Because once you fold these up, you're not going to really end up with anything identifiable, it's okay if you're like, what was that? We'll pretend those are the yellow flower Jonquils day lilies. Going to go ahead and just play. That's the goal, play and create. Your goal is to cover the entire page edge edge because we're folding this. We're not throwing out any of the pieces that we're doing here. We'll be using all of these pieces in our book. I've done some where I've just painted everything, but I'm feeling like, let's just do something a little different on this. This one. Once you do one or two of these, then you start getting brave and you start thinking, what else could I create and see where you can go. The goal here is to work fast and not get hung up on what you've put down and then we'll mark make in addition to this. And you can use any of your tools that you've got on hand that you're like, try this or I want to try that. Use them. See what they do. See if you can smudge some things around and get some marks going. See, I might do another one just using watercolor in my bowl scraper to just make it kind of crazy and move stuff around. Once you get to the point where you're like, I think I got enough paint there. Let that dry, whatever layer that is. Then I'm going to use some stuff on this one that dries super fast. I'm going to use temper paints because they dry super fast and I can keep on layering on top of this. The first layer is all paint, and I'll see you back here for the next layer. 5. Mark Making on First Painted Sheet: Miss Lear, let's do some mark making and some play. It doesn't matter if yours looks just terrible because at this point, it's going to look funky. I might pull some paint pens and I'm going to definitely pull some temper sticks. Now it's time to start mark making and playing. Whatever your heart desires here. I got a tiny bit of wet paint, but I'm going to go for it anyway. But now I'm going to start just making some favorite marks or experimenting, making some pattern, playing. This can be in an art style that you always create. It can be something crazy and fun and playful like I've chosen to do. But don't get stuck in here. It's a time to experiment with all of your paint supplies, which is why I like doing stuff like this. It's low commitment, it's low pressure. You know, 'cause this is not something that, you know, it's something for you. It's a fun personal thing to do. But then when you have all these books to flip through, Oh, I can't tell you how happy they make me. Let's draw some lines here in our little rainbows I like them. I like them when they go bigger. I should make a bigger one. Oh, that might be the next one. So let's just keep on playing here. For some reason, I like this pretty don color here in these temper sticks. What I really love love about them is they basically dry almost immediately, and then you can keep layering on top of them. And they're big and chunky, so you can make big areas of color. I mean, these are so fun that I can see myself just sinking into these for a while and making a ton of them. I get so obsessed with the fun books that when I find one that I just love love, I make 20 of them. This is so much fun just to sit and play and randomly layer and play with color and mark making and not really being super attached to what you're creating. So if you have a hard time letting go, these would probably be a good practice play thing for you because you're not so invested in the outcome of creating a masterpiece or some amazing piece of art that you're like, Oh, no, I messed it up or what have you. These are more like craziness is the point. Let's just play and see what crazy thing we can come up with. It's part of what makes this so fun and it frees you up from that perfectionism and getting stuck in what you created and being upset when something did not work out the way you thought it should. This is a good project for that, getting unstuck and just saying, Okay, let's just play and see what I get because you're not making a masterpiece with these. Maybe you are, but I'm not. I'm not working on a masterpiece. I'm playing. I'm having fun. I'm just trying to see where can we end up? It's free knowing that this is not the finished piece of art. The book that we make is the finished piece of art. You just don't have to get hung up on whether this is the ugly stage because it's going to be the ugly stage. And take some joy in that. I love it. I love it. I'm loving this. Time to play with some color pallets, your supplies, get out something easy that's not going to smear like a temper stick. Paint pins. 'Cause you're gonna be touching and folding and creasing and so anything that's going to smear might not be the best choice. So I don't have out the oil pastels today. Oh, see, now, the more you add, the funner these get. Now I just kind of these actually make me very happy when I look at them. They're crazy, and they're fun. What else do I want to add? Let's see. I got some fun paint pins over here. And I could you could stop at some point, too and say, I don't know what else it needs, and you could make your book. And then finish each page with mark making that you think certain pages need it doesn't have to be the whole thing have to be finished at this point. At this point, we're painting and covering most of it, but we can add final touches and marks after we've got the book put together and you can evaluate each page and say, what does this page need or what does that page need? I'm so thrilled usually with the book after I put it together that a lot of times I don't continue adding to it, but it's your own personal preference and whatever goal you have for the book. Something like this would be a cool addition to a collection that you've got in a gallery, for instance, and you could have had this in the same color palette as your collection that you made. Then these could have been some fun, crazy wild sketch things that go with art books that go with that collection. Can you imagine that? That would be super fun. I like that. Good choice. Oh, no, I don't think blue. These are the little Artyx markers that I'm kind of grabbing for because I got so many colors and I like them. So let's see. Is there anything else that is calling my name? Maybe the funky orange 'cause it kind of matches that little flower that we've got there. Hey. Oh, let's get some gold in here. Thing about the gold is this takes a while to dry, so that might be that pin might not be the best choice. Maybe y'all 'cause the fine line stuff, depending on how thick I put that gold, well, I kind of want some like some little de Lllies in here though. Wow. And then maybe I'll do some gold dots with you do it with your dip pen. I'm going to use this zig marker that I haven't pulled out in a while and add some more gold. I tend to like these when they're crazy, but I'm going to paint another one with acrylic paint, I think that's going to be more abstract and not I mean, this is abstract, but it's going to be don't put your fingers on the gold. But I mean, more minimalist abstract. Let's do that. Let's call this one good for now and I'm going to paint one that's more with acrylic paint and just see some differences there. I'll see you in the next video. 6. Painting Second Sheet Of Paper: Okay, we're gonna set this to the side to dry while we paint another background, and I just want to paint it with some different materials than I've been using because I had another idea in my mind for the way I want one of these books to maybe look. So I've got black. I've got off white in the Mattacrylic, I like these because they dry matte and the sage blue. So wanting that color palette neutrally. I'm going to take my mat. This is the Matt Blackwing. I'm going to go ahead and go back old school with some mark making and stuff that I experimented with quite a while back and do some more of it. This is a little more in my mind, we may get somewhere different, which is what usually happens with what I'm creating. But in my mind, I'm looking for a little more minimalist maybe. I'm going to say that with a grain of salt. Who knows where we're actually going to end up. But we'll just get some fun mark making in here. All right. Then I'm thinking, I've got my cheap paint brush here and I'm going to smush color around and then maybe a lot of times too, I mix my color with esos and allow me to layer stuff on top. But because we're using this matte paint or at least I am I I have not put gesso in these, but I could. I normally do. It makes it spread easier. Well, maybe I will go ahead with a little bit. I like the weight gesso. I've got clear gesso up there also. But I just like the way it makes everything spread and move around. And if you're using regular acrylic paint, it'll allow you to layer stuff on top. I don't generally have too much trouble layering stuff with the matte paint, but you definitely will with other paints. And then I also like the look that the white adds into the blue and the different I don't know, I just like it better than water. I'm just going to move these around with my spreader. I'm already. Maybe I just should go with the blue. I'm already excited where this is going. And I put a brr over here, so I thought it might be fun to try to brayer some stuff and just see, how would that look compared to a paint brush? So get out all your little tools that you're like, What does this do or what does that do? Use this moment to experiment with those. I do want to go to the edge of the paper on these the whole page is part of the book. So don't go to the edge and stop short on everything, or look weird. A. Don't worry about the backside. The backside. Not really gonna be seeing that the way I make these. Alright. Then I've got a little bit of black. Do I want the black? Maybe I'll pick the black up with my spreader and work it in that way instead of brushing it on. What. Look at that. Good choice. 'Cause I don't want it to be all black, but I do want the contrast in there. You see you can still see the marks that I put down too. So you're going to see some of those sometimes and sometimes you won't and just don't even worry if you do or you don't. It's a good way to start the page and not get stuck on white page paralysis, basically. That's fun. You got to make sure every page has something on it. Don't get like, Oh, this is done on the big sheet and forget that we're folding this into little pages. So all the stuff that we leave kind of in here, not done. It's going to be not done on maybe a whole page. That might be a whole page. So don't forget. That we need to cover the majority of this. Like, it looks done now if we kept it as a whole big piece, which that's pretty cool too. If you're painting and you're like, Whoa, like the piece I created big, you don't have to make a book out of it. Go paint another piece of paper and save that. You might end up with some really happy, cool surprises if you just let your mind free from the stress and worry of creating something amazing. Then I usually create something amazing and I'm like, Oh, my goodness, I made that. That's where I find the joy in the process. This is so cool. I want a little bit of black on every page, so I'm going to spread that out just a little bit just to see in the end what I ended up with, but I do want there to be a even spread of that so that we get a little of that on each of the pages. Then when we fold the book, we can then go, what else does it need? What did I forget? Where did it not have anything? Because you'll be surprised at how cool some of these compositions are. Good choice, good choice, good choice. I think for this one, I said minimalist, so I'm going to resist adding a whole bunch more stuff to it. I'm going to let this one dry and then we'll be ready to fold up some books. I want you to paint a plethora of these. Paint several. Paint enough that you've made three or four books when we're done that look really cool because I can't wait to see them. I'm going to let this dry and then we'll be ready to fold. 7. Simple Folded Slit Book: Alright, so we are going to create the second type of book now with one piece of paper. And we don't need to cover anything because itself covers itself. And I love these, and I have the other big one that I already had painted that I showed you at the beginning of class, I'm going to fold this one and that one, and we'll have two books here finished. And basically, what we need to do is we need to start off folding our art this way in half. Well, let's fold it this way in half first. We got one fold going this way. And then we'll have three folds on the other side. So fold the long side first. That's the only fold that we need here on this side of the paper, and I'm just trying to be real careful and line those up real good. And if you've got anything on here that would smear, then you might grab, you know, a piece of wax paper or something like that because you need to go ahead and flatten that real good with your hand or with a spoon or with the bone folder. We're going to really get that in. And this will protect the art itself from you smearing stuff all over it accidentally from whatever you're doing. So now we've got one fold. Now we're going to fold this direction right in half, again, just like we just did. Again, prot that piece of art with a piece of wax paper. I just got a whole big box of this wax paper that I use in my art room all the time. So I've got plenty of these little sheets handy. There we go. Now we've got this one, and in the end, we're going to be making a dou. So on this one, we're going to fold it up so that we're right in half. And then I'm on the back side, so it doesn't really matter about the backside. So I'm going to fold both of these up until I'm right there in the center and hopefully I get them nice and even. This is the harder side to fold. Then when you're all done, you've basically folded yourself like a D. Then what we're going to do, you're folding all of that on the top side. And we're gonna cut this right here. That one line that we did right down the middle of that. We're going to cut that right in half on that line. And I'm doing it with a pair of scissors. Just do the best job that you can we can straighten this up in the end after we get it together. So cut that right there till that first fold. Then we are ready to do this. Oh. Look how magic that was, and this is going to be our book. Look. Flow on the front of my book. Okay, that was perfect. Then we can see each of the pages as we flip. And then this would be the back side of the book. So you can decide which of those are going to be the front or the back. But what I'm going to do first is we're going to glue these together. Open that back up. That's basically our goal though. Open that back up and we're going to put some glue on all of these, so I could glue those basically together and you only see the front side and the pages are just nice and thick. A little bit of glue on these, and you can use whatever glue you have on hand. Again, I'm just using the Uh stick. Is what I keep on hand, and just a little bit of glue out there. Then you got to be careful. You got to open it back up the way we just did with that little for some doing its thing. So don't just fold it over and glue it. That's not going to be right. Fold it over, but then fold it this way at the same time so that you can get the right pages glued together. Because you're going to pull these this way and get those glued together. And then we've got four different pages. And I'm just going to get some tissue and get any glue off of here that we've got coming out. And then what was our front? This was going to be our front. So I'm gonna go ahead and fold that this away and get my bone folder. These are just super handy. And if you've got anything that'll smear, again, bone fold on a piece of wax paper if you need to. I'm just gonna force that in. Look at that. Oh, my goodness. And then, you know, now this end, it's mostly straight. I don't know. They're not straight they're not straight. But here's what you do if that bothers you, is you now can take your book and I like having something on here that gives me a line I can visually kind of line up with so I can see that I'm getting them straight. And here I'm lining up with a row of dots. And basically, after they're glued together, you can take your knife and very carefully score right down through the layers. Don't try to do all the layers at the same time, a nice firm grip and keep it lined up with the ruler, there we go. We've tightened our edge up. You can do that with all the sides if you need to. Let's just do it as a practice here. And again, I'm just visually lining that up, trying to keep those as straight as I can. I like this ruler. I got it at the dicklck because it's got a lip here and it protects your finger from the knife slipping because it's a nice thick edge. I really like it. Look at our book and now look at that. Now all our pages are even, everything is glued. We've got the front and byte cover, and then we can flip and look at each page inside and just be amazed and awed at the compositions that we magically end up with. It's the coolest thing every single time. I love, love what we get. And then, too, at this point, we can decide, do any of the pages need any additional mark making, anything that would pull this together better for you if something's not working. But, man, I love these. So that's the size one. And I thought what we would do because I did paint a great big one, thought what we would do is go ahead and make one more out of this big one that I already had painted. So again, on this one, we're folding it in half and then we're folding it with the four on this side. So we're folding it in half of this away. And it's a whole lot larger. And so it's a little trickier to work with, but we're folding it inside to inside here. So your piece of art is on the outside. And then just do the best you can. And you've seen that we can very easily straighten these out, and then can take our bone folder again and get that nice get a nice edge on there without smearing it across our art and whatever we've got on our page. So if you're using things like charcoal and pastels and things like that, instead of what I've used, which is tempera paint and stuff, you'll need to protect that. So now we've folded it that way. Now, let's fold it this away. And again, don't get hung up on perfect you can cut those at the end to be perfect. So fold it in half one way and then fold it in half this away on the short end, and on the short side here we're gonna be going now on the inside. If you fold it backwards, then you realize you fold it backwards. It's not a big deal. When you're done, you can just flip that fold the other direction. It's not like it's going to ruin it or you did it wrong. You can just flip it the other way. So don't get hung up if you flip them the wrong way. It's not a big deal. It's not a deal breaker. Okay, there we go. Now we've got all that. Now we've got fold, fold, fold, and one along the edge. So what we're going to do And there we go. I folded it backwards. We want an M. So as I was saying that, I did it for you. Well, look, I kind of like doing stuff like that on camera when I'm talking, I just start going other directions. But when I do it on camera for you, you can see how easy it is to fix and you don't get hung up on, Oh, no, I did it wrong. So in the end, there we go. H we're looking for basically a W. And what we're going to do is hold the W and cut that one center line that we had created when we folded it in half the other way. So there we go. That's funny. I always take a detour accidentally. I had a friend right after I got out of college and we went on a road trip, and she's like, we should go on a detour while we're out here on this trip. I'm like, I'm driving. So we may be detouring whether we wanted to or not. And we laughed and giggled, and then we're driving home. And we get to one point, we're like, Where are we? And so we get the map out of the trunk because this is before GPSs we're like, looking at it, and we pulled over at this little gas station that had a Sashquach zoo sign off to the side of it. So I'm like, I mean, how much more fun could that be? And we're looking at the map, and we get the guy inside to tell us where are we? And we realized that we missed a turn 40 miles back, and I'm like, Hey, here's your detour. We got so cracked up. Okay, so now we've got chole cut in the center, and that's how we're gonna pull these four together. So there we go. Let's see what we got. Let's see what we want to be to cover. I mean, that's pretty cool. Oh, Mom. That's kind of cool. Oh, that one's cool. Okay, I feel like that should be my cover. That's gonna be the back. And we've got some stuff on the inside. We've randomly got. Okay, that's pretty cool. Don't want it to be that way, though, with part of the rainbow. Oh, my gosh. Decisions, decisions. Okay, but before we even really make the final decision there, let's go ahead and open it back up. And we're gonna tape these pages. And I apologize. If we go in and out of focus, the camera doesn't like white paper, so I'm hoping it'll stay focused on my hand. Alright. Once we got a little bit of glue everywhere, now we are ready. We want the edges to glue, but not the centers. We want the centers to come out and glue like this. So don't just fold it over and stick them down. I want you to fold them, but then make sure that your center parts are getting folded, too. Okay. Oh, I kind of like that, too. That could be the cover. Let's see. Alright, so I'm looking at each of these. Oh, okay. Actually, you know what? This is the cover. Okay. I love it. Now I'm just gonna put this on here. Look at that. Oh. Oh, my gosh, every single one of these, I'm like, This is my favorite. But you know what? Every time I do this, each one is my favorite. Okay, songs, just picking these down. Really good. And then so here's our book. Look how cool that is. Oh, my gosh. So now I'm gonna go ahead and one more time, I'm gonna go ahead and slice these for us. Sharp knife. If you start slicing and your knife doesn't want to cut, you need a sharp blade, so change your blade out. Sometimes I'm definitely working with the same blade for too long. So once that blade quits cutting, is that pretty straight? Well, nope. Once that blade quits cutting, you need to go ahead and change the blade. I'm just lining that up there. There we go. Look at that. Oh, my goodness. Look at that. This one is amazing. And it was just lots of scribble and play. And now you've got these lovely books for inspiration. Here's the smaller one that we made. Look how amazing those turn out and how much inspiration that you can get from that. I hope you enjoy making these. I mean, I just want to paint big sheets of paper all day and then turn them into a little artbok because my goal is to have lots of finished little art books. And this it don't get any easier than making a little artbok in one play session at your table. So those are super fun and I can't wait to see what you do with this project, and I'll see you back in class. Elia. Elia. 8. Zig Zag Folding Book: Alright. This second piece that I painted is dry. And what I'm going to make out of this one is a book that looks a bit like this. It's got a little bit of a cover on it. And then as we open the pages and flip through them, we can see different parts that we've painted in our larger book. And I've put a cover on it because I glued all the pages together. So you can see all the pages are double thickness there, and they're a little wonky, so I'll show you on one of the books, how you can make them less wonky, just because I was cutting with scissors and I wasn't being too exact. These are more for fun ideas, looking at where the compositions ended up, deciding on whether any of the pages need more work or what have you, but they're more for me just I enjoy making the pages and then seeing what the book looks like when it's done. These are super fun and I'm going to put just a handmade paper as my cover because I like the handmade papers. You can paint another piece of watercolor paper and then use that piece you painted as the cover. But this is really easy to make. This one, I divided the paper into fours this way, folding it, and fours this way, and then I folded everything up. But this one, I'm going to divide it up into fours on the long way and threes on the short way since I don't have as much paper to work with. Basically, all we're going to do, it really doesn't matter which way you do this. If you think it'll be easier to work paint side to paint side, you can do that. And we're going to start with this long side, and I'm going to fold it in half, try to make sure that my edges here line up. There we go. And then I'm going to come back down here and flatten that out. Then this is where our bone folder comes in handy. We can give that a nice crease. And now I'm gonna fold this part into the fold. So half the paper right into the fold here. Which this paper, that's the side. That's the paper has short grain and long grain fibers, and one direction is much easier to fold than the other direction. And you're usually looking for that direction when you make books so that all your pages fold correctly. But when you're working with a book like this, we're folding both directions. It just is what it is. Do the best we can. That we're working with kind of a cheap paper, so that's not giving us any help there either. All right. So once we've done that, now we've got our folds going that way so you can see there. Now I'm going to fold it in to a third. I'm going to measure the paper so that I actually get that fold at the right spot. So let's do this. So we've got 12 ". And so I'm going to mark this at the four and the eight. Then I can do that further down so I can line those up. And now I'm just folding that in this away, just trying to get as close as I can, and hopefully straight on that line, I just painted painted droop. You can see I got it right there on it. And just go ahead and squish that down. And then we're looking on this side. This side might be a little easier now we can just come up to what we just created. Making sure my papers straight as I can get it there. Again, just taking that bone folder and getting a good edge. Or your spoon. If you've got a spoon, you can do that with a spoon. Now you can see that we have created a whole bunch of squares in doing that. What I'm going to do is on the long side, I'm going to cut three squares right here. I'm going to cut these three right here. And then this one, we're going to leave it there. And so we're going to come around the corner, and then here, I'm going to cut. I'm going to leave this one. I've left this one, so I'm going to come from this direction and cut three squares. I'm looking to cut three squares here and coming from the other direction, three squares there. I might do this with my knife to see if I can get a little bit better line that I got on the other one that I made. But the goal is to leave the boxes there on the corner with not cutting those. And so we're going to take her knife, line that up, and we're going to cut Three of those, and I got a tiny bit crooked at the end. That's okay. And then we're gonna turn it around and do the same thing on that line that I drew. You can do it with scissors. I did the other ones with scissors. And there we go. Now we're ready to fold. And so what I want to do, one of these will be the front, one of these will be the back. And I want the front to be blank. So I'm gonna fold that first one down so that it's going paint side to paint side. Then I'm going to zigzag and go back and forward so that all the unpainted sides are sticking together and all the painted sides are making the inside of my book. So down because that's the unpainted side, and then zigzag goes back and forth. And when I get here, I'm going to go down so that all the unpainted sides are on this side. So you can see everything unpainted and all the painted sides you're on this side. Then Oh, my gosh, you guys. This is going to be my most favorite book I ever made. That's a fun technique if you want to just play with a little bit of acrylic paint and give yourself a beautiful little abstract book. What I'm going to do is I want this side to all be attached. I don't want it to stay like this. I'm going to take my glue stick and I'm going to glue the backsides of each of these pages. This page sticks here, so I'm going to glue these pages together. This page sticks here, so I'm going to glue those pages together. I'm going to glue these pages together. I'm just going to work it as I go. And just glue it down. Then this one is the next page and just glue that down and then this one's the next page. You see it's just real easy to work your way through. This one is the next page. It's real easy just to flip and work your way through on these. That goes down. This is the next page, and then I should just be left with the back cover and the front cover without the glue. What you can do at this point, stick these down real good. You might take your bone folder and really squish those edges and everything. If anything is super duper wonky, and you think, what the heck? You could at this point. So out some glue out there. You could at this point straighten your edges by simply taking your ruler right here and your knife and cutting that several times as you cut all the way through the layers until you get to the bottom, and that will give you a straight edge on all your sides. I'm not super picky on this. I do do it on the next one though, so I'm not going to do it on this one. But I am going to do it. I got glue coming out of my edges here, so I'm just cleaning those up. I'm not going to do that on this one, but I am going to do it on the other style that we create. Then once you've got these glued down. Now we're ready for the cover, and I'm going to put a fun cover of the handmade paper on it because I like the handmade paper and I'm just going to go ahead and glue it down and then trim it up. I'm just going to put glue on this side right here. And I'm going to stick it down. If the edges aren't straight on your handmade paper, you might need to allow extra room there. But I'm pretty good right there, I think. I'm glued on the wrong side. All right. We're going to have this side as our cover. I'm a nut. I'm a nut. That's okay. That's okay. Don't let the small things get to you. It's still pretty on both sides. If not, you could have pulled that off, flipped it over, and just sacrificed this little piece here, but I'm good with that. Except for the name. I got these papers at the **** Blick. If you're wondering where you can get lovely handmade papers. And so now that one is set. And I'm gonna try. Let's cut some of this off. I'm gonna try to give me a hem. I'm gonna leave enough paper to actually tear, 'cause I'm kind of wondering if I can get a nice torn edge instead of a cut edge. And if you're better at figuring out as you're going, um, how to do some of these instead of waiting and doing it at the point that I'm doing it, you're welcome to do that. There we go. Yes. That's what I wanted. Alright, let's do this right here. And it just gives me kind of the same edge there on each side. And I'm just lining it up with the edge of the book so that I'm lining up with what we've already got going on here. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect. Perfect is overrated. Look how cool that logs. Oh, my gosh. Then just give it some time to dry and this book is basically done. Now look at this. Look at that Oh, my gosh. Look how pretty that cover is on there, even if it is on the back side. I almost matches better on the back side because you just have a pattern there that leads into this. Then these are like many little masterpieces. Somehow that just always works out that way. It's amazing to me. And now you could use these as inspiration and jumping off points for ideas for bigger abstracts. This is an excellent way to get everything your thoughts together on creating some big abstract pieces. Then at this point, you could evaluate and say, do any of these pages need any extra mark making or any extra color or any extra lines? Maybe at this point, you're like, maybe some mark making on top of this would make it finished for me or what have you. You can come back on the top and do some extra marks and lines and maybe some extra dashes or whatever it is that your favorite marks are now is the time to come back and evaluate each page and decide, does it need anymore? Is it finished? Can I help the composition to a complete space? Then you've got this amazing piece of art. You can see where I was saying that these would be an excellent addition to a whole series if you created abstracts in these color ways or if this was your jumping off point for some abstracts, how these would be beautiful compliments to those paintings. There's our first book. Now I'm going to grab some papers and we do the second book, so I'll see you back in the next video. 9. Alternative Zig Zag Option: Show you one more fold here on the zig zag one because on the book that we made, we did three sections and four sections. And so I'm going to do four sections and four sections just to show you what that looks like and how much smaller that gives you for a book. And so I thought what we would do real quick is maybe just do a little bit of painting on this and then we'll fold this one up. Um, so more than anything, too, you could make these blank papers ready to paint on. But I want to go ahead and give myself at least a little bit of mark making, and then, so you don't have to have a fully painted page to begin with, but I want to give myself a visual here for what's the right side and the wrong side. Then once you fold your book up and you glue it and put a cover if you want, now you can come back and paint these later, paint them whenever you want to paint them. You don't have to paint everything today. Now, we're basically going to fold this in half, just like we did before and you can do a piece of the wax paper if you want to protect your pages. Hmm. But I'm just going quickly here to give you an idea on how you would do the extra set of folding. And this is the direction of the paper that it doesn't want to fold, so it's a little harder. There's one direction that it wants to fold and one direction that it doesn't want to fold, and that's the one that doesn't want to fold. So now we've got three folds on that side, and then I'm gonna come back and fold this side. It's easier. You definitely tell which way the paper wants to go. And now I did it in half rather than a third, third, and a third, like I did on the other. So now we're going to come right into the center fold, and that's our next fold. And we're also coming right in on this center fold. And again, I could have done all these on the inside with paper on the inside. It really doesn't matter. And now I've got one, two, three, and one, two, three, and we're all in quarters. Basically, what we're doing here is we're still cutting three sections, but now I'm cutting three sections right here. And over here, I'm cutting three sections, not cutting this section, but I'm cutting three sections all the way down to here. And then over here, I'm cutting three sections right here. You can see I've left this one and I've left this one, and I've left this one intact. And we'll just take our scissors and if you have a big enough piece of paper, I mean, you could do even more than the three folds and the four folds like I did. You could depending on your paper size and what your goal was, you could make it even bigger bigger. So right up to that. Then seeing, see, I'm cutting a zig zag, basically, coming back to this side. And there we go. Now we've made one big zig zag, so we've got an extra one than we had on the other one. Again, I want this to be the outside. So that's going to be my first fold is arch side to side. And then we just start folding art side to arch side always, and then white to white backside to backside. So again, backside to back side, arch side to side. And so all the art will be on one side and all the whites will be the back. Then we've got a cover and a cover, and then we've got our art pieces on the front. Now you can simply just like we did on the other one is glue all the backsides to the backsides. Don't glue the front sides. But now you can go ahead and create this out gluing all the backsides together to keep keep the book together like that. And then we can get our bone folder and a piece of the paper we want and really just squish that down better. Now you're ready to put a cover on it just like we did our original piece. But you can see we've got the cover. All of these sides would stick together, so I need to let that dry. And then you could just like we did that bigger one because I got so sloppy with my folding and stuff, you could cut these just like we did these books. You could cut that and have a good edge if you wanted to trim these down and you do it basically the same way. You would line that up and then get all of the layers where you were going to get them all straight and get them all in there, and then definitely going to take a few more trims because it's a lot thicker. But we can get them all lined up just like that and we can cut the edges to be the same. And you might get those all trimmed before you put the cover on it, and then put the cover on last. But this is how you would fix these also so that everything lined up and was straight and pretty if the wonky edges drive you insane. Which the wonky edges sometimes drive you insane, but sometimes it adds to the charm of the handmade book. Alright, now all the edges are good except for this back edge. But the back edge doesn't even matter, so let me go grab a piece of paper. Gonna use this pretty orange paper. And that would be about the right sizesh so I'm gonna just cut myself a size here. Then we can just glue this down. It's not really straight anywhere, so I'm just going to glue it down. And then I'll put a little glue right there where the spine would be even though it's not completely straight. I'm not even worried about making it exact. If you get any glue on the front side, you can just go ahead and tissue that off. That just barely made it, didn't it? That just barely was the right size. Then we can trim that cover to the right size. We can either do that with our knife because we've got enough of the book as our guide there and the papers so thin that I can just use the book edge as the guide. And there we go. Now we have nice even edges if the edges being wonky would bug you. Got a nice cover covering all of that. Now you've got pages in here that are ready for you to continue decorating and painting and doing whatever you'd like. If you'd like it to be a true sketchbook paint book, now you're ready to continue adding to your book. I personally like to paint the paper first and then just see what serendipitously. I've got glue on my finger. What just serendipitously ends up. But I don't know, that's pretty cool to be able to fill them in after the fact, too. You got choices there. All right. I'll see you back in class. Y. 10. Books We Made Recap: Let's just take one last look here at the books that we created in class and just admire how amazing these really come out. These are my very favorite. Get the biggest piece of paper you can. I was working on the gigantic 18 by 24 papers with the Canson to make these big sized ones. These are a good size to make as a gift. This could be the coolest card that you make for somebody where maybe you put some lovely ceniments and stuff on the inside. Uh, for them, you could really get creative with this as a card. But I love these art books, and I'm going to have a whole bunch of them and just add that to my stash of art books that I have that I'm making with the other art journals. But these are a fun addition to that, and they're like a one day one paint session kind of project that you could then end up with things like this that make me ridiculously happy. For reals, look at this. Now, this would be a very jolly happy happy birthday and then all the fun times that we had in our life, little sentiments in there or something or just a book that you want to give to somebody that is beautiful that they can enjoy and look through. I'd love these. Then the other fold, where we put our own little cover on it, if you work with the 18 by 24 piece of paper, this is the size book you'll get. If you work with, and that was the same number of folds as I did on this one. If you work with this size paper, 12 by 18, this is the size book you get. Now, if you work with the 12 by 18 and you add the extra line of folding in there, like I did on this book, this is the size you end up with. Um, so it's quite a bit of difference versus where you started to where you end up. This is basically a 16th of the size of this paper, and this one's basically a 12th, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, basically there versus this one being one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. So these two are made out of the same paper. This was made out of the larger paper. Which was this one. This was one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, I think this is the 16th, one, two, three, four. This was the 16th, one, two, three, four. I did the four fold on this one. If we did the three fold on this one, we would have ended up with a book that was quite a bit larger because we would have had one, two, three, and it would have been this much larger than it did and it would have been this much larger. It would have been a whole lot bigger if we did the three folds on one side versus the four folds on one side. That's another thing to play with is how many of those rows that you fold. This is folding four, the long way, three, the short way, is this one versus four and four. Play with the number of folds that you do on these zig zag books, you end up with different sizes, which is really cool how that works out. And then I love that. You can put a little cover on this. That can be your art. Any kind of cover you want to make. That's just a little handmade paper on mine. Then again, you've got a full sketchbook inside artbok that you created and you can continue to add to and re evaluate the pages and decide, is this finished? Does it need more and wherever you want to go with that. This one may be one of my very favorites because I already buy and collect this type of abstract. This is the abstract I would hang on my walls. And this is right up my alley for the most beautiful book that I could have made. I need to paint some bigger pieces in this style, which is completely different in the bright colorful, how many marks can I make style? It's interesting. Whatever your style of art is, you can do that and make the book to be really personal to what you love and enjoy. I hope you enjoy creating some of these books with me in class today. I can't wait to see what you end up creating. So definitely come back and share those in the project gallery. Rely makes my day when I log in and see projects in there. I can't wait to see yours, so I'll see you next time. Lo 11. Final Thoughts: We wrap up this class, I hope you feel inspired by the possibilities of creating art books from just a single piece of paper. This project is a great way to experiment with your materials, embrace the joy of mark making, and discover how simple techniques can transform your artwork into something functional. Remember, the beauty of this process lies in the unique results each piece brings. I encourage you to explore different color palettes, mediums, and designs in future projects. Thank you for joining me, and I can't wait to see what books you create. I