Madnesssssss

       So here’s the book, almost 100% done! All I need to do it let the entire book be pressed for a little while, add the extra leather in the corners, and separate the back end page from the crease where it accidentally got glued while being pressed yesterday so I can actually bend the book easily.

       I realize I didn’t pull the thread tight enough when binding the signatures, but there’s not much I can do about that now. I’ll be sure to pull extra tight when I make another one. Also, I could have probably put in more signatures to really fill out the book. Oh well, at least this was really fun to make! :)

              Here’s some updates on my book! As you can see in the first picture, I messed up on cutting the corners and have to use some leftover leather to fill in those spaces, but I added the bookmark! If I hadn’t forgotten that the thread you can see at the top of the pictures is thicker than my normal needles, I would’ve had the paper bound for today, but as it is, I forgot to get bigger needles when I was out yesterday and will probably do that today sometime. I hope to have it done by tomorrow so I can bring it on my trip on Sunday (I’ll be addressing this in my next post).

       I haven’t been as active on here as I would have liked and have uploaded even less art than I had anticipated now that summer’s here. For anyone who’s friends with me on Facebook, you’ve seen these pictures before because I’ve been liveblogging the entire process, but here are some WIPs of the leather-bound codex book I’m making.

       The book itself is going to be approximately 6”x 9”, a dark brown leather (what’s shown in the pictures is the underside of the leather) with a dark blue bookmark ribbon, and printer paper pages. I’m going with printer paper because they’re already the size I need and I didn’t want to have to deal with cutting each page of some fancy paper and making them all the correct size because there is a 100% chance that I would mess it up. Still deciding on what color to marbleize the end pages (the decorative papers on the inside of the covers that cover the binder board), but I’m open to suggestions! :)

         Here’s some horrible nail art, one nail for every season plus an angel banishing sigil and a devil’s trap. Couldn’t add close-ups of the thumbs because of the post limit and I’m sorry about the crapiness of the ones that are there, —insert obligatory “they look better in person” statement here—. I wanted to take a picture of them before they were cleaned up because the likelihood that I will mess them up when using the polish remover is about 99.9%. (Also, I have no idea where the white nail polish went so I had to use silver instead.)

These’re the rest of the school notebook sketches, not a lot this semester, sorry! (And, *gasp*, there’s a pencil drawing amongst them!) Apologizing in advance for my French, again.

Finally set up my new printer, so here are some scans of my school notebook doodles! More will be following, just didn’t want to make this post too long. Once again, sorry for any crappy French in the doodles.

              So, I finished my book project, mostly because we had to have it done today, because, trust me, there’s a lot I think I could improve on or fix or add. Ignore the white paper sticking out of the first picture, it’s the grading rubric I had to stick in there. And yes, the last page is the Dancing Men cypher from “The Dancing Men” short story of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories; I thought my hand was going to fall off doing it, but I think it’s worth it. (The encoded text is part of the opening of The Valley of Fearbecause that is literally my favorite interaction between the two of them.)

            The page with the bees is painted and is not super detailed because I was more focused with putting as much paint on the page as possible in order to qualify it as my texture page. (We were required to have an artist page, a pop-out page, a self-portrait page, a texture page, and a text page, along with filler pages.) The words on the 5th page are from The Phantom of the Opera in the original French.

            Sorry for the crappy quality of some of the pictures, I took them quickly before turning it in and sorry for how long this post is, for some reason the “read more” option is not on here.

             So, for my art class, we’re doing a section on book making and I figured that I might as well post the progress here because I haven’t really posted any of my own art in a while. I’m aware none of the edges are straight because— for some god-forsaken reason— I cannot cut with either an X-ACTO knife or scissors in a straight line to save my life. Also, sorry for the blurry bottom pic of the cover insides, I was in a hurry today to get them put under the press and still leave class on time. (The top pic shows the covers as pretty curved because that one was taken before I put in in the press; they’re basically flat now, which is good.)

         I’ve decided on a Victorian/Rococo theme for my book and will be posting the cameos I’m going to make for the front and back covers to act as the ends of a closing chord probably by either Sunday or Monday. Other than that, I’m not quite sure when I’ll finish each page that goes in this, but I’ll post them as I finish.

Awwww yessss! It stayed black this time! :)