Making Tree Books


About two months ago, my LA class and I started making tree books, working with an artist named Peg Gignoux. My book is in the images above. Here is her link: https://gignouxart.com/

First, we did screen printing. We made short poems (just a sentence or two) a little before this about a tree in our yard, and we used some words from those sentences and to screen print onto the cardboard that you now see glued onto the front and back of the book. After this, we cut the top of the cardboard to look like branches.

After this, we folded a big piece of white paper in ways that actually made the base of our books. Then we used akua ink. This was really fun. We gathered plants and brought them to school, and we did a process that ended up with akua ink prints of the plants on paper.

Next, we collaged some of those prints and other things on our tree books. After that, we added two or more pockets, decorating them to look cool.

What we used these pockets for was to put in things we’d written. We wrote three things. One was a piece of writing called Salute To My Roots. We each wrote about a few people that had really influenced our lives and made us who we are today. I wrote about my parents.

We also wrote Life Lists — a list of things we want to do during our lifetime, and that was really cool. I’ll probably look bad at mine in five years and say, “These were the things I wanted to do in life?!”

And finally, we wrote several wishes we had — I wrote mine on a piece of paper with an akua ink print, and we glued them into our tree books or put them in a pocket. They could be wished for us, for our family or friends, for the world. We did this because we’re reading a book called Wishtree by Katherine Applegate about a wishtree and how the tree’s life is.

 

And after all this, we actually got to see our book displayed at an art gallery (Frank Gallery: https://www.frankisart.com/) and that was really, really cool and super crazy. And that pretty much sums up making the tree books!