It's my last semester of my MFA in Illustration at the University of Edinburgh College of Art. Can you believe it? This is the semester I pull together projects to display in our graduation show. No works-in-progress there - it will be a super-slick presentation of finished pieces. So, I have lots of work to do.
The first project I decided to tackle was to bind my
Marginal Creatures into home-made books. Doing this requires several steps, each of which has its own challenges.
First, I cut 2mil cardboard to my template, glued and wrapped them with book cloth. To this, I screen printed my titles. I mixed white and silver acrylic paint in the hopes that I could mimic the cover of my inspiration book, Debi Gliori's NIGHT SHIFT (that inspired another project I'll share soon).
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This was a lot of work for a very small image. So small, in fact, I had to share a screen with somebody else's work.
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Screen-printing is a finicky method, so my heart was in my throat as I made a few test prints and then applied it to my already assembled book covers. It so easily could have gone wrong. Happily, four of the five that I did turned out great. I'll take those numbers!
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I tried several different combinations. White on black, silver on black, and white on grey. The black on grey was the fail - the ink spread outside the parameters of the burn area - fuzzy. PAH. But the white on grey worked.
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It took a day for these to dry. With that time, I printed my interiors. The pages alternate between Strathmore book paper and vellum (with the haikus). I had to fernangle a printer to take my hand-cut papers with deckle edges, but I finally got it to work. I collated them with their covers.
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I cut down the pages then sewed them together with Japanese punch binding.
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Here you can see the red endpaper too.
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Almost done! Next I'll secure the pages into their covers and VOILA! I'm looking into how to share it with you as a flip-through. More soon!
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