Scrapbook Peeks 1

30 years ago a scrapbook was just a multicoloured book made of sugar paper that you filled with newspaper cuttings, gig tickets and photographs and left it at that. Now when you think of scrapbooking, most people think of handmade books that detail events, memories and family holidays with added paint, paper and all manner of decoration to become works of art in their own right. I'm not a scrapbooker in the the strictest sense, but I love mixed media art and use many techniques that can be found in modern scrapbooking in my own art over the years. But I do keep an old fashioned sugar paper one, that has pages out of magazines, printed off the internet, scanned from books even postcards and interesting packaging. Essentially, anything that catches my eye! Currently, I have three scrapbooks, two sugar paper ones and the other spiral bound with cartridge paper. 

 I started one many years ago when I first started studying art and design. It was my theory tutor that asked my whole group to start a collection of imagery that we liked, as a sort of personal, visual dictionary that we could refer to, and I still do it, many (ahem) years later! Sometimes I might annotate an image with an idea, but other than that its just get picture, glue and you're done. No decorating, embellishing or creating. If I am stuck for inspiration I head straight to the scrapbooks. And its really amazing how the vast majority of things haven't really dated, and I can still see them as fresh as anything on any blog I might read today. So, every now and again,  I am going to share some favourite pages with you!

These pages contain images from photography magazines, focusing on blurring, double exposure and long shutter speeds. At the time I found it refreshing not to have to document every little bit of research and link it back to my practical work, so I have no idea where many of the images came from or who the artists were, but really, thats not the point. Its all about the imagery rather than the context.

Em x