White Shark altered book by Maggie KerriganJust for fun this week, I’m sharing the process of my most recent piece, “White Shark.”  It’s for a show theme: Below the Surface.  Imagine the luck of finding a book at the thrift store called “Great White.”
I immediately had the vision for this piece.

shark head wire frame 1To make the 3-D shark, I started with a wire frame and then slowly applied strips of book paper over the frame using Ph-neutral glue.  There were several layers before the dorsal fin and flippers were built and added.  shark head in progress

After a few more layers, it was sturdy enough for the outer “skin.”   There was a chapter in the book that focused on the conservation of sharks, so those pages were cut into strips and used for the gray skin on the top of the shark.  The white underbelly is made of paper from the blank margins of the pages.

IMG_3587Meanwhile, I made a set of dentures for the shark by trimming out teeth and gluing rows of them together.  These were set aside and not “installed” until the very end.  So this fierce shark only had gums for a while!

With the shark finished, I was at a major point of hesitation.  The next step had to do with how to make the pages look like water and attach the shark to the book so that it looked like it was lunging out of it.  There was a lot of procrastinating because it required cutting up the book, and what if it didn’t work?  I spent about 10 days thinking through this, testing a prototype on a different book and asking opinions.

Then finally took the plunge and used the x-acto knife to make the waves and the splash. Click here to watch a video:  Video of making the waves

The final steps entailed drilling holes with my hand drill (that hand drill was an awesome Mother’s Day gift last year!) and anchoring the wires that were connected to the shark’s head.  Then I added eyes (cut from the black chapter headers), glued the teeth in, and worked with the “waves” to make them look like they were splashing around the shark.  This piece was a challenge, but also Great Fun!

White Shark by Maggie Kerrigan