by Steve | Jul 23, 2012 | Projects |
A few months ago I scored several of the small Peerless Bonus Packs at a going out of business sale. The small bonus pack has forty colors on 2″ X 2″ sheets. Normally, they’re in the $22.00 to $26.00 range but the because I’d been a frequent customer the owner ended up charging me $10.00 each. They’ve been sitting on my desk for a while and I’d been considering making a small coptic bound book out of one of them but after tinkering around I decided against it. I would have had to interleave each color with an acetate sheet and the whole affair would have ended up being too bulky.
Instead of a book, I ended up opting for Jane Davenport’s solution. I’ve seen various riffs on this theme and while I wanted to make one, I’m fairly lazy and I felt like measuring everything out would be a drag. I went the digital route and used Adobe Illustrator’s distribute function to line everything up. Once the template was done, I cut a piece of 300 gsm Fabriano Artistico down to letter size and ran it through my laser printer. The pallet is made from both the Peerless Bonus pack and the Peerless Complete Edition and I just cut the sheets up with a pair of scissors and applied them to the palette with some Tombow permeant adhesive. The only thing not pictured, is a piece of acetate that prevents the colors from rubbing together.
Want to make one of your own? Download the template by clicking on the link below:
Peerless Palette Template
by Steve | Jul 22, 2012 | Recently Bound |
I’ve been traveling for my Clark Kent job so I hadn’t had time to complete the third in a series of three books I had been working on until today. I used wood to create the covers for the first two in this series but on this one, I chose polymer clay simply because cutting up tiny pieces of wood on a table saw presents some safety issues. The coverall size of this book is small, it’s 1 1/2″ X 2″. Not too much too say about it you can just look at the photos, the front has a contrasting stripe of black polymer clay and the back has some copper studs.
by Steve | Jul 8, 2012 | Recently Bound |
I wrapped up the second book in the series of three I’m working on late last night. The covers for this book came from a board that I uncovered while tidying up. I remember buying this board, a piece of Fiddleback Maple because it had some spalling along the edge and I wanted to work it into the design. While the wood looked beautiful on it’s own, I wanted just a touch of contrast so I did some inlay using a scrap of Bloodwood with the same technique I used on the small Walnut Journal.
Pretty much a lazy choice on my part but hey, the tools were already out. To get everything where it needed to be, the back cover ended up just short of the length it needed to be and I was just going to live with it but I realized I had enough left on the Bloodwood scrap so I edge-glued it onto the back cover, trimmed it up and brought it up to the right length. It’s difficult to see in the photo, but you look closely you can just make it out along the bottom of the back cover, it’s only about 1/4″ wide. This book is 8 1/2″ X 5 1/2″ – enjoy.
by Steve | Jul 7, 2012 | Recently Bound |
This year the 4th of July fell on on Wednesday which as you might imagine left an awkward space in the middle of the week. Binding some books seemed like a good way to fill the space so I grabbed a package of Fabriano Artistico and began tearing it down. Beyond the mid-week lull, the other factor driving me was that my small Mesquite Journal only had two pages left in it. It’s a small journal, about 4 3/4″ X 3″ and I made it from the branch of a mesquite tree that a storm took down. Over the time I’ve been working in this journal I’ve really gotten to like the size so I wanted another one the same size. Here’s a shot of the Mesquite Journal i you haven’t seen it.
5 1/2″ X 8 1/2″ is also a favorite size so after a few quick calculations six sheets yielded enough for three books. One 5 1/2″ X 8 1/2″, one 4 3/4″ X 3″ and a micro-book 1 1/2″ X 2 7/8″. The first book out of the three completed was the one I intend to replace the Mesquite one with. The covers are walnut burl. Like the mesquite journal, I inlaid the cover with a contrasting wood, in this case fiddleback maple. Here it is.
More to come.
