Making A Playground for Ideas: WonderBooks

In thinking about a Year of Wonder Project, making WonderBooks to record thoughts, ideas, possibilities are important.  Here are a few possibilities.

I. Making Your Own WonderBook





II. Gesso:  A Book: How to Make an Altered WonderBook




III. Collected Artifacts: Filling Your WonderBooks (Favorite Things)



IV. Embedding an Art Conversation into Your WonderBook

Conversing without speaking and using paint as the medium for exchange is the idea behind art conversations. My friend, Jane Gangi and her students at Mount St. Mary's College have been busy engaging children through art conversations.  Adding an art conversation to your WonderBook allows you to think beyond the spoken word.  Here are a few examples of children's art conversations.

Genesis of an Art Conversation (Reilly, 2009)

V. Your WonderBook

The first rule is there are no rules.  A WonderBook is a place to set down tentative ideas, explorations, disconnections.  It is very much a playground for ideas. I have never consistently kept a 'writer's notebook', but I have lots and lots of artist-books where I think and explore ideas and feelings. Some of these have been made with paper and others are digital.

This is a page from one of those books that later became a finished art piece, The Alphabet is No Language.

A page from my WonderBook