Caution Wet Paint

I've been working for almost two weeks on an awesome final project for my Book Arts class. It is a concept book filled almost to overflowing with only the best, most well thought-out content humanly possible under the constrictions of the available technological advancements and current weather. I have spent hours and hours carefully painting each and every page into what I would easily describe as a masterpiece. Having finished the difficult task of painting some thirty pages of bland off-white paper into epic conceptual art, I moved on to the next step. I took out my needle and selected a killer soundtrack, not to sew to like some nursing home convict, but rather to bind together all the pages of my book in a process that all the cool kids are calling "book binding." I agree, the term should be cooler but cool kids really don't have time to waste on thinking up terrific names, they are much too busy being cool.

After binding the pages I glued the whole thing together in a sloppy mess of glue that would have made a preschooler proud. After the entire book was completed, I went about pressing it. This smooshes everything down and makes it all tight and compressed. It is an important step in the process. A step that will forever live in infamy. As if a child's first steps were off a waterfall into a pit filled with lava and alligators in lava resistant suits, but not suits that look like spacemen or chemical spill cleanup crews, but rather nice suits like an Italian Prime Minister would wear to a celebrity wedding.

I came to check on my book after hours of pressing only to find that the pressure had been too much, just as every teen in a social outing being dared to do a backflip off the roof to land in a kiddie pool filled with marbles and empty coke bottles fully understands, with too much pressure... bad things happen. The amazing paintings on each page of my book were sticking together. The paint on each page had somehow fused to the paint on the opposite side under the pressure. I tried to slowly and carefully peel apart the layers salvaging my work. Luckily many of the pages came apart again with minimal damage, but several of the pages had made too many new friends on the other side and refused to return without leaving something behind for their new friends to remember them by. It is a tragic tale, one that needs a happy ending. The good news, Brad Pitt is playing the main character in this story's big screen adaptation. Happy- The End.