Latest Artwork

I was killing some time in the holidays and I decided to do an altered book. I found a suitable book at the second hand store for $3 - a marriage manual by Hannah and Abraham Stone. It's from 1937 so I expected the writing to be incredibly outdated. Surprisingly, a lot of the information is quite decent and still applies, being as it mainly relates to biology and science rather than morals and social norms. It even says that x rays to the testicles are not a good form of contraception. Who knew?

The book's about gender, in a way. Of course, my ideas deteriorated somewhat. It's barely finished, I'd say I've only altered about 1/10th of it!

You'll have to forgive me for my scans, hardback books don't always scan properly.

Ta da! The main thing with this one was trying to draw them in exactly the same place. I did another one later in the book:

Turns out the pages in the main body of the book don't showcase pencil very well. Who knew?

Don't mind my terrible gender politics here.

I originally intended to do some wallpaper with negative spaces, then I gave up and drew the guy over the top, using only basic colours (a fairly standard red, blue, brown, green, yellow, white and black.)I did something similar later on, except I chose a less standard set of restrictive colours. This is Roisin Murphy, but I drew a beard on her. Along the same lines, this is Robert Del Naja aka 3D from Massive Attack. I chose him to turn into art nouveau because he just has the appearance of an entirely normal looking man. If that makes sense. It probably doesn't. Funnily enough, this is the second Robert for me to turn into Art Nouveau

Art Nouveau's a very bothersome, time consuming style, which I get reminded of whenever I try to attempt it.

Speaking of 3D, I implore you to watch this video for Butterfly Caught by Massive Attack. Although it's by far not the best Massive Attack song, or my favourite, it's very visually intriguing. (When people ask what inspires me, it's usually stuff like this as opposed to fine artists!)This one's done in ordinary crayola crayons. I left my test strip in (one unwrapped green crayon looks much the same as another until you test them and one's lime green and one's forest green.)This one isn't that good. I limited the colours on the face but not on the hair/snail. Snails are hermaphrodites. It's time for self portraits! (Just in case I hadn't already had enough of them.) I also did a strange androgyny/transgender one:And now available with gender differentiation!Apparently the male one makes me look like George Michael. C'est la vie.  Ships are always she,  and for some reason people always presume animals are "he" until proven otherwise. The ship lady turns up in some of my later work, with a face!

Until next time. The book isn't finished, but I've put it on indefinite hold. Run out of inspiration/have too much other stuff to do. Enjoy.

Somehow I don't think she's smiling.

Apologies to Grant Wood and Edvard Munch. No apologies to Leonardo Da Vinci because I don't even like the Mona Lisa, I think it's boring as hell and doesn't deserve to be the most famous painting ever. 

Back at the end of 2007 I had the naive idea that I would send around a book to be altered. This book is called "Great Stars of Hollywood's Golden Age" and despite the aghast manner in which someone treated me when they found out I was destroying books..this campy little paperback was heading towards the rubbish when my brother found it on a nature strip.

I am now taking my plea to the internet. Is there anyone interested in altering a book? If I get sufficient interest (either comment below or email me at louisa.giffard@gmail.com) I'll consider sending it out, to be sent to artistic types around the country (or the world..) to be altered and added to. Nothing too gluey and chunky because with paperbacks it makes them almost impossible to close. I found that the hard way with the last book I did.

Below is just a little image I found in a Trentemoller CD that I liked, and drew on a page in purple pen. I just felt like drawing it..and..the book was there gathering dust so I decided I'd try and restart the "project."

Either that or I'll just do the entire book myself..as a sort of..alternative sketchbook. Fine either way but it would be interesting to make this a community project.