This is part of the board book + medieval manuscripts series.
This book was originally Joey Counts to Ten which I picked up in the street. In fact I have picked up two copies. The colours are delicious, but I couldn’t see a way to incorporate them into the text.
Like Alice, I made a simple story to bring meaning (and attention) to the medieval images.
The background pages are china coated pages from an interior design book I’ve been plundering for a while. There’s immensive pleasure in using sharpies on china coated paper!
I’m always struck by how “modern” the images and backgrounds are. I DO avoid too many Christs on the Cross, but there’s so many others.
The medieval manuscripts are from the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, where James and I spent hours looking at everything, including what was amazing at the time, scanned manuscripts of Beethoven’s hand-written scores and such – things you can now look at online (but i really DON’T do that, do I?). I bought the book to remember the place (plus we were buying so many books, which were SO cheap in the US that year, 2008, just before the Global Financial Crisis). It’s miniature book, and I have well and truly gutted it for this series. Given in the intervening years I’ve maybe leafed through it twice, i think this is a good use of the book!
So it’s an altered book, covered with another altered book, and another altered book glued in. Altered. Enjoying this series because there’s a lot of calming prep to get the pages covered, and then a lot of mindful gluing and creating a story, and then finally mindful / mindless colouring in. It’s got built in endorphins at the end of each step.
