I chose a terracotta goatskin for the cover to accent the orange in the illustration. The top edge had been painted originally with a bright yellow gold, but I did not like the look with the leather so I airbrushed a darker orange gold over it. The other edges were left uncolored.
I began with the larger shapes and cut the onlays out of black and two shades of green. I decided to do the lines of the drawing with black line onlays.
I drew out the image on a 3 ply Bristol board and began cutting out the drawing. As I cut along a line, I then taped the pieces back together with a low tack blue masking tape. I first focused around the large onlay pieces.
The drawing was placed over the trimmed and pared cover leather. Only then I could remove the piece of the bristol board where an onlay would go. When the onlay was trimmed and edge pared to fit, I scraped the cover leather and used a paste and PVA mixture to adhere the piece in place.
When the onlays were all adhered to the leather, I back pared the piece and pasted it on the book.
All of the tooling was done with a single stylus. I lifted out a section and with a warm tool, outlined the open shape. I lifted the drawing, and used a small brush to put water over the line. Then I tooled it again with the warm tool, creating a blind tooled line. This stylus is available from Talas; it is called the Ascona tool http://apps.webcreate.com/ecom/catalog/product_specific.cfm?ClientID=15&ProductID=23963
I began to glue the strip of leather by dragging it through PVA and then dragging it across the waste paper, leaving a small amount of glue on the leather strip. It was then placed in the tooled line and rubbed down with a piece of Japanese tissue to absorb any extra glue that might ooze out.
Then to continue gluing the strip in place, I folded the strip back and brushed on more glue over an inch or two wide area. I rubbed it down in place and repeated that until the line was finished. With this image, you can see that I have the lines end away from the edge of the boards so they will not be easy rubbed out of place when the book is held.
Absolutely Beautiful! Thank you for sharing.
ReplyDeleteI love the explanation of the process, as well as the results. Thanks, Jana!
ReplyDeletegreat idea ... :) for me as ebook cover designer &
ReplyDeletebook cover designer i could say this good enough for alternative covering of books. or anything that has to be covered.
Wow, Jana - this is great! The black lines are really amazing (actually all of it is amazing :)
ReplyDelete