Old Personal Diaries – 1999 to 2006

Posted by houseoforigin on July 8, 2012 · 1 Comment 

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Here are a few more dairies.

These ones were a lot more labour intensive to make…and indeed use.

They all started out using old magazines, newspapers and the like and you would be surprised at how hard it is to find an image or a clean bit of colour or just something you actually like and have a halfway decent reverse side.  This proved to be such a task in the first year, before I learnt to search and cull, that I actually used spray-adhesive to stick together every single page…So time consuming.

Every year I selected a theme and made the cover and the month-divider pages carry that theme.  One year it was a flight safety manual for a cover and another year I had these amazing old illustrations of “automobiles”, “carapaces” or “national dress” or some other random thing so I used these throughout.  This provided a way of ongoing appreciation, rather than just throwing them away, or indeed keeping them in a drawer and flicking through them every few years when I made a spring clean.

The left hand image is a stencil I made for an old flatmate and sprayed on a wall near our place since we knew the house was to be demolished later that year. Couldn’t let that little piece of history go.

These pages are some uni work from that year as well as some stuff I had on my wall.

In 2003 I did a photography course and one of the surprising outcomes of that was all of these elegant little test strips of photographic paper. I used these, as well as some over/under-developed photos for my laminated covers as well as my month dividers. Again, a nice reminder of the past in a practical way.

This cover combined a photo I had taken with a stencil I had made of Bruce Lee. I was pretty into screen printing my own tee-shirts at this time as well as stenciling my neighbourhood.

The lamination of the cover also allowed me to do some interesting collages that would be durable and not disintegrate over the course of the year, roughing it in my uni bag. The orange on silver was a stencil I made for a tee-shirt. I think it is a still from one of the Animatrix films which were out at the time.

The inside of the rear cover was also some play on the reverse of the actual back cover, again with Bruce Lee. I think this was the first time that i had a hole through the collage which was then laminated over, making a window. Pretty high tech!

As 2003 was my second year of studying architecture, I thought it only appropriate to use these old school diagrammatic examples of “national buildings”.

Specimens anyone? These pages were really beautiful illustrations and amazing examples of contemporary thought cicra 1930.

I often dismantled the uni diary or some similar annual thing to get some of the utilitarian pages, dates, calenders and contacts etc.

This is a poster and some classy letrasetting. In these pre-laminating days, I wrapped the poster around a piece of cardboard and then put this in a A4 plastic sleeve which I then sealed up. Not exactly high-tech, but seemed to do the job and saved me the $4 I eventually splurged on laminating.

Simple image over cardboard

Naughty, I know, but these covers come from a flight safety manual I “liberated” from one of my backpacking jaunts. Also saved me laminated the covers, saving $4.

This year’s cover was a single image cut in half, so when fully opened you got the full page flight escape manual. I was probably somewhat inspired by the “Fight Club” air-safety scenes.

I was pretty into Japanese art and culture in my early 20s, a trend which has carried over into architecture. I also studied Japanese and travelled there, so this year my name was in Katakana characters. Rad. Pity that was about all I learnt.

Again, very heavily influenced by Japanese culture and Buddhism around this time.

This was my first diary and was pretty unsophisticated. The covers were just hard-wearing cardboard with a sheet of plastic bound in front for some kind of protection…not that effective, but it did manage to get me through the year, just.

Filed under Diaries, Past Works · Tagged with architecture, art, collage, colour, composition, creative, design, diary, Inspiration, inspired, nostalgia, paper, Personal, photography, recycle, Sydney, work