Inspired by: Jill Berry

I recently purchased Jill Berry's book called Personal Geographies. Jill creates art that is like a map of her experiences. She uses different style maps, creating them completely from scratch or altering photos using Photoshop. Each map tells a story about some part of her life.

I became interested in her art when I stumbled on her blog. She's generous with her experience, often posting directions to artwork she has created. She posted a little tutorial about making a cover for a book, and inserting two signatures of pages for the book. She did a simple painting on the cover of beach dunes and the sky. Well, being quite the beach girl myself, this caught my eye, and I knew I had to make my very own beach book.

Here is the painted cover and some closeups.




You take the mid-point of the cover and fold that in half. Then re-open it. Take the mid-point of each half and fold those in half. They create the front and back covers, and they are now two-sided covers, instead of the inside being white.


I folded paper to make two 5-sheet signatures. Five sheets folded in half make 20 pages, so this is a 40-page book.


The signatures are stitched in. I used embroidery floss, but I think next time I'll use waxed thread. I had trouble with the threads coming apart and stitching through the middle of one. I also didn't quite understand how to put two signatures in, so I struggled, and made up my own technique.


While I was at it, I painted another cover, that is ready to become a book.



I realize this wasn't really a Jill Berry map project, but that will be my next adventure. If you'd like to read Jill's blog that is devoted to maps, you can see it here.