August Fodder School 1 Project Review + Thoughts on My Turn as the FS Instructor of the Month

Credit Sarah Gardener @juicy.s.art Watch a flip through on YouTube!

It’s a crazy exciting thing to have so many creatives play with your online course content in an offering like Fodder School. This blog post will highlight a small sampling of the beauty and deliciousness that now exists in the world after my August FS1 lesson release.

Patience Required

Oftentimes when artists agree to be an instructor in a group course offering, it can be a very long time between filming their class and having the students see their lessons. That’s just a simple fact, so those of us that choose to teach in these offerings need to have a lot of patience. The creative trees that we plant may not bear fruit for a year or sometimes even more!

Fodder School happens to be a year long art course offering that I own and operate with Tiffany Sharpe as the Executive Producer. But just like all of the other instructors, I had to have the patience to wait to see what would happen and whether or not the Fodder School participants would find inspiration in (hopefully even fall in love with) the concept for my Fodder School month, a handmade book project with a fabric hinged binding.

My Inspiration for this Project

Contrary to popular myth, projects don’t spring forth into artist-instructor’s brains out of thin air. At least they don’t for me. And I suspect I’m not alone.

As an artist I am constantly taking in visual information and deciding if something is interesting, exciting and inspiring to me (aka research). I have an ongoing list in my brain of things I’ve seen that I fall in love with and ideas that I want to try out (few get to the stage where I actually try them out because, well . . . time).

There was one bookbinding concept that had caught my attention and I did a ton of research on the history of it and even located the artist who originally developed the technique. Her name is DJ Petit and even though she has retired from teaching art courses, her work lives on through the magic of the internet.

I fell in love with DJ’s books. I studied every photograph I could find of them. I worked with DJ to see if we could bring an online course of hers to life, but she wasn’t physically up for it.

We became friends. I really value her perspective and knowledge. DJ made me one of her handmade books and shipped it off to me. It is pure magic. There’s nothing like a book made by DJ Petit.

DJ’s binding structure became the springboard for this entire project.

Credit Tiffany Sharpe @tiffanysimplysharpe

I set out figuring out for myself how to bind a book “The DJ Way.” It involved fabric and the hinging of pages. I’ve never seen DJ actually do it, and maybe that was a good thing. I developed my own process for doing it, and I created many books with fabric hinged pages, loving each and every one of them (it really is a magical technique with a very unique look).

Then one day I was totally overcome with emotion over a conflict that was happening in the world. I wasn’t directly involved, but the conflict had me feeling extremely emotional. I was doing a lot of learning about the conflict and as much self reflection as I could to help myself navigate the emotions of it and actually grow from it.

I ended up putting what I was learning and feeling at the time into one handmade book. For me, the process of creating a book and then slowly and meditatively writing out quotes and passages from deep thinkers into my own special book helps to calm my nervous system down.

Credit @omshanthi.om

Credit @omshanthi.om

I loved that book that I created, I called it my Wage Peace book, and I was hoping that other people would find the process both challenging and calming at the same time (if that’s possible!)

I decided that I would birth this book into something that was available for other people, and that it would be my project for the first ever round of Fodder School.

I think I can now safely say that other people love this book as much as I do.

Instead of showing you photos of my books, or even DJ’s, I’ve decided to highlight just some of the books that were created by the Fodder School artists with my August lessons. Those lessons are available for anyone to access at any time by enrolling in Fodder School 1.

Credit Kellie Leininger Patton @rabidrossifan46

To be honest, my only regret is that I don’t have more time in my life to create many more of this style of handmade book. It is pure joy from beginning to end.

My consolation is that thousands of other artists are now making these books. Many of the FS1 participants decided to make more than one of these books.

But I’ve got new lands to explore and other mountains to climb. I’m deep into filming my Fodder School 2 lessons right now, so I’m just going to have to revel in other participant’s books for the time being!

Credit Tracey Wozniak @more.than.marmalade

Learn more about Fodder School

There are so many more outstanding examples of our Fodder School project from August. Here is but a small sampling!

Credit Megan Quinlan @meganquinlanstudio

Credit Mathilde Bottenheft @madebymathilde

Credit Corinne Schönholzer @coresch4

Credit Sophie Kerdellant @sophie.kerdellant

Credit Wendy @my_arty_party_

Credit Debbie Austin @debbieaustinjohnson

Credit Karen Elaine @karenelainecreative

That’s it for this blog post! I hope you enjoyed it. I’m completely and utterly blown away by how much heart and soul the artists of Fodder School put into their projects. They really are something special!

If you want to see even more examples of work from Fodder School, search for the hashtag #fodderschoolproject on Instagram.

Learn more about Fodder School