Book Art

Sometimes I really love my classes at school. They push me to try new things and stretch my limits. I haven’t done very much with bookbinding in the past, just some very basic stuff when I was 13. Luckily my alternative processes class requires handmade books to display the prints we are working on and I have been able to dabble in it some more. I made a book with several signatures for my Cyanotypes, but I post on that book later.

For now, here is the book I made for my Van Dyke prints, “Sticks and Stones”.

I found a strong surface to be the base of my cover (the stiff board that came with large sheets of watercolor paper I purchased.) I selected a couple of pieces of scrapbook paper, cut everything to size, then used Super 77 spray adhesive to adhere the cover boards to the paper. I finished off the inside cover with a piece of card stock to formalize the look.

For the final touches I cropped a couple reject Van Dyke prints used in the book, and created an inkjet print of the title page for the title. I coated the cover with a layer of Mod Podge to seal it. The ink on the title was not all that happy with the addition of the Mod Podge, but I was able to salvage it, albeit with a lot of the ink removed.

For the binding, I chose a Japanese bookbinding technique and used linen bookbinding thread. To jazz it up a bit and play off the title, I added a twig that I found outside my apartment. (The paper is composed of stone dust, so it ties in the stone element of the title too.)

I like the way it turned out! I think the twig makes the binding a little more unique. =)

I’ve really loved using this method of displaying prints. It’s polished, attractive, and engaging. I love that it only took about 5 hours to complete the cover and the binding. I will definitely be doing this again with more of my work!

Working Title and Raw Pages

For my “School Daze” Van Dyke Handmade book, I needed a visually interesting title. I don’t know where it came from, but I remembered I had some old school papers from when I was a kid and I thought maybe I might find something there that I could work with.

I found a story that I wrote probably when I was 6 or 7 about a baby bear (which was a little painful to read actually. Going back to read old writing always does that to me.) I sampled letters from the story and I came up with this.

I was able to print all my images last night too and here are the pages that will be included in the book. The are printed though Van Dyke processing on Roobee stone paper (which is awesome by the way).