Fuck Yeah, Book Arts!

What at first look like delicate works of carved porcelain are actually thousands of layers of soft white paper, carved into busts, skulls, and human forms by Beijing artist Li Hongbo. A book editor and designer, the artist became fascinated by traditional Chinese toys and festive decorations known as paper gourds made from glued layers of thin paper which can be stored flat but then opened to reveal a flower or other shape. He applied the same honeycomb-like paper structure to much larger human forms resulting in these highly flexible sculptures. Hongbo recently had a solo show at Dominik Mersch Gallery in Australia who made the videos above, and you can see much more of his work on their website.

(Source: thisiscolossal.com)

Miniature Alchemy Book (by Maylar)

It took me some time to make this saddle stitch bound book…it measures 2 cm x 2.5 cm with 36 pages including endpapers. There is an alchemical symbol/sigil on every page, including it’s meaning/name in English above it. Pages are made of paper dyed in Earl Grey tea, to give them special coloration, and carefully made “dirty” so the book would looked used. Covers are real leather ,and had to be carefully prepared and  given the same look of age/usage as the inner book has …numerous use of alcohol, mineral oil, turpentine and acrylics to accomplish this, but I’m pretty satisfied with result. After that, I did the gilding. Finally, the book was burned a bit (using ember, rather than open fire and even like that it had to be done very, very carefully, avoiding any real damage!)

teachingliteracy:

aeternums:

Ophelia’s Skull | Owen W. Lee

The work is a part of a project that aims at re-coding Shakespeare in the 21st century’s vision. The skull represents a well-known tragic character, Ophelia in Hamlet, who is many times used as a symbol of tragic death in a variety of art works in art history. The lyrical, unique literary style has been borrowed to describe the scene by artists. Most of the pieces are mainly focused upon depicting the scene that Queen Gertrude tells people the death from drowning of Ophelia. however, it is deemed that Shakespeare himself is more concentrated upon the dialectic between life and death.The project interactively delivers synesthetic images to audiences with visuals, sounds, textures, scripts and materials. The skull is a straightforward object to symbolise death, simultaneously,the surface is decorated with graceful sentences from the scene of Ophelia’s death in another aspect of the beauty of death.

Inside the skull, a paper strip hand-crank musical box is placed so that audiences can feel the emotion of the tragic beauty in the 16th century renaissance melody and rhythm, which have been reinterpreted and composed by the designer after an analysis of the 16th century’s lute music by John Dowland (England, 1563–1626). The artwork reminds of automata in the 16th–17th century in Europe.The music and the visual are converged upon multi-sensory delivery in an analogue and tactile flavour. This project is now expecting 2nd Version based upon contemporary technology.

ianbrooks:

Adventurer’s Diary by Souverein

Commission piece done for 3dartistonline.com as a tutorial on 3D sculpturing. Appropriate too, because my skull is also filled with unreadable script.

Artist: Behance / Website / Twitter

farewell-kingdom:

Fernando Vicente, Atlas

flentes:

Artist James Hopkins created skulls out of different household items he arranged on several bookshelves. His series entitled ‘Vanitas’ is quite a clever, modern take on this still life genre. ‘Vanitas’ can be defined as a type of symbolic art, often including symbols like skulls, rotten fruit, hourglasses, and other items related to the brevity of life and the certainty of death.

(Source: dormio)

Brian Dettmer book arts

(via unicorn-meat-is-too-mainstream)

(by Kaylee Lin)

(via de-bore-ah)

actegratuit:

Paper sculpture

by chrisdonia

fer1972:

A Skull of Books by Maskull Lasserre