Making Marginal Books

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).

     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.

     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!

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.

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.

     I cut down the pages then sewed them together with Japanese punch binding.

     Here you can see the red endpaper too.

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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