Cut, Paste, Create is a brand new design journal created by Eleanor Shakespeare and finished by you! The book starts with some key collage tips from Eleanor which introduce 52 projects for you to complete ranging from building tree houses to designing cushions for a sofa and cheery umbrellas for rainy days.
Leading on from the huge adult-colouring trend which seems to be dying down a little (although I am still loving Johanna Basford’s releases), activity books seem to be the big new trend in publishing. I read recently that this is down to the fact that publishers are looking to emulate the experience the younger generation are used to on screen, and that it is no longer enough for any form of media to be complete when published but instead should be interactive in one way or another. The increase in popularity has also made the activity book market a very saturated one and any book hoping to stand out from the crowd must have a fairly unique quality. Cut, Paste, Create’s niche comes from its vintage twist. Just like Eleanor’s beautiful portfolio of work, the book is filled with monochrome drawings and photographs, aged textures, retro colours and inky typography. As well as creating an already aesthetically pleasing start to your artworks, this gives a gentle nod to a past era of analogue and celebrates it as a simpler, and in many ways more creative time.
I imagine this genre of book, whilst popular, must be one of the hardest to create. In essence, Eleanor has been tasked with designing a blank for the reader’s imagination to run free on – no small challenge but one that she has risen to excellently. Although each page is beautifully composed and features elements in Eleanor’s signature style, making the book uniquely hers, there is still heaps of space for expressing your personal style of collage.
As I use collage a lot in my own illustration work, I am a huge advocate for its soothing qualities. Colouring in is all well and good but the stress of staying inside the lines can be too much at the end of a long day. However, with collage there is no such stress as you are able to calmly cut out each section and lay it on the page, finding the perfect composition before committing to glue. If you are looking for a stress-free creative hobby, collage is definitely the therapeutic pass time for you and I would highly recommend Cut, Past, Create as the perfect setting in which to discover it.
Greg McIndoe
