Rebus Books

The definition of a rebus book is...

A puzzle in which words are represented by combinations of pictures and individual letters.

I like the way these puzzles become a piece of artwork which you have to think about as well as read, and I would like this to come across in my work. This has inspired me to take my work in a slightly different direction. 

Rebus Puzzle/book

"A bee came and stung his foot"

The work that I am doing at the moment involves cutouts of patterns on different shapes. As the cutouts I have chosen reflect the themes and imagery in Alice in Wonderland,  I now feel like I needed a reason to be choosing the 3D shape as well.

Final Piece Idea.

I now have a final idea which involves an A0 sized scan of page 175 of Alice in Wonderland. I will then chose certain words from the page and cut them out (in a rectangular shape) and will make a 3D shape from whatever sized word I end up with. I will then cut into this with a pattern or image based on what that word says. This way I will be creating my own kind of Rebus puzzle.

So far I have experimented with a few different ways that I could do this. I have found that cubes are a good shape to create because of the shape of the cutout word. I have therefore tried having the text on the inside and the outside.

The word for this cutout was 'Petals" but having the word on the inside made it very hard to read.

This cutout was inspired by the word "Rose" and as you can see, having the word on the outside has meant that it is a lot easier to see.

I have also experimented by not making a shape at all, and just cutting into the word.

This cutout was inspired by the word "questions" and I also decided to hang the question marks which I cutout from the piece too.

After experimenting with these ideas, I think the cubes with the text on the outside work best but I might combine the idea of hanging the cutouts from the cube if it applies. I still need to decide whether to do one shape and keep it constant, or whether to do lots of different shapes and ideas (as I need to ensure that it isn't too confusing).

The idea is therefore that you read the page as a form of rebus puzzle: as you go along the text you will see boxes which represent the word thats missing. The pattern and the faint text should help reveal to the reader what that word is.