Creating a Blizzard Book

My art work often leads me to the creation of little journals or concertina books to present a process or idea. The Blizzard book is a more complex example of these. The first one I saw had me enthralled as to how you got those folds in place and could insert little tags in the folds. i was not to be beaten. It was very challenging working from written instructions but I finally got there. And now I am keen to do some more so next Saturday I am going to my art group who are having a day on making these. It should be fun.

I began by making a simpler concertina with the Blizzard folds just at the front and back. That wasn’t too hard but then came the challenge of folding every page in so that it created the folded “pockets. The size of the finished book is quite small in comparison to the paper size I started with.

Above you can see the simpler bottom pocket with a vertical fold to hold the tags. I thought it needed to be more integrated so I added a screen of leaves across the bottom. I cut out some little tags and stamped and coloured them with water colour pencils.

Practicing, I had just used white paper, so the next phase was to multiple layer print some paper for the full Blizzard. As a long piece the paper doesn’t look so appealing but I was counting on the folding mixing up the patterns and was pleased with the outcome. You can see a close up of the Blizzard book completed. And then I distressed some little tags with distress ink, stamped some images on them and coloured them with water colour pencils. The final image shows the tags inserted into the pocket folds