"Unreadable Books" an Art Book making workshop with Max and friends at Artbook@X

My friend Sarah had allerted me that on Saturday, January 16th a most interesting art book-making workshop was taking place at Artbook@X on West 22nd street, here in NY. The workshop was led by Pietro Corraini who makes extraordinary artful books for children. Pietro's goal was to show children (and their parents) how to make a book without words or images.

Pietro, who ran the workshop with Ilaria Rodella, began by showing many examples of mini books, all made without words, using very interesting materials like: clear plastic pages, flat sponges for pages, felt, vellum and pages that are cut in order to see through to the next page in some way.

Then Pietro invited the children to spread out at the two tables, which were laden with piles of interesting art materials of all sorts, from markers and glue to containers of white rice and piles of fluffy cotton balls.
The only rule in putting together the book seemed to be that there were no rules; other than not using any words.





Below: Joseph (right) and Max (center) pay close attention to Pietro's instructions, and flip through the sample books Pietro passed around.

The poster for the event.










Instructor Pietro, Max, Davis and his mom, Tamra.

Max and Davis both chose to make Star Wars stories, all without text.  Davis chose to use a long, rolling out scroll-like piece of paper for his story. He described it as giving ideas for TV shows. Max
drew scenes like a story board for a film, on graph paper, which he bound by clipping together with a large black clip.


Max's book "The Mendolrians".

The girls work away on their books. 
When all the children were finished with their books, they were invited to come up and talk about them.

Max points out pages from his book. Max's friends Davis and Joseph also discuss their books.

Below: Joseph talks about his book.

below: Davis talks about his interesting scroll-style book.

A fun part for parents going to the workshops is that they are often invited to "make their own projects as well"...here is my all white materials book, made with vellum paper.

This page (above) has white string and flat cotton pads on the left, and paper cut into a cloud shape with a metal hanger hanging from it, below are three circular cotton pads and a flattened pile of white rice, glued down.

On this page is a spaghetti like pile of white string, glued down on the left, and on the right hand page, several metal doll hangers, hovering above a pulled apart cotton ball, which is glued down.








Below: The last two pages are more piles of white strings glued down.