What is CIAK?
CIAK is a brand of handmade notebooks from Italy. They have nice leather cover with practical elastic closure. You can see their range of wonderful products at their website.
I was among the 19 artists/designers invited to participate in the CIAK Asia Tour Exhibition: ‘Create’ – Ideas Are Meant To Be Realized. Each artist/designer is given a CIAK notebook of their choice to use to sketch ideas. This notebook is then displayed in the exhibition along with a sample of the artist/designer’s finished work/products. The opening was on the 20th of September at LOG ON, Festival Walk in Kowloon and I attended it. It was fun and interesting to see how others used their CIAK notebooks.
I customized mine by adding a handle that I made using a thick gross-grained ribbon. I then stamped and heat-embossed the cover with Ztampf! ClearStamps images. I rubbed stamping ink in several different colors directly on the leather to create a nuance of colors and I really like the way it turned out. Inside, I drew some sketches to show how the ideas for some of Ztampf! products were formed and developed. Print out of some Ztampf! products are displayed alongside my CIAK notebook.
There are artists/designers from Japan, US, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. I got to talk to 2 of them, both are from Hong Kong. One is Carrie Chau, a famous illustrator and the other is May King, a fashion/bag designer. There are quite a lot of action-figure designers too!
I will post some more pictures later!