So here's a quick re-cap for anyone who is new to the party, I am a fine Art painter who paints both figurative and landscape Art, in oils. My goal is to take my Art empire to the next level, and ditch my part time job and go full guns blazing into a sole Art career. After a bit of research I discovered that to prop up my fine art work I need a passive income that will still give me an income if my Art doesn't sell well. So I have given myself a time out on my oil painting, and will for the next 6 weeks or so be concentrating on my illustration range called Dark Curiosity, its a bit quirky and not everyone cup of tea, but I personally love it.
So having created all these characters, I decided to try my hand at applying them to different items, surfaces, that I could sell, when I launch my Etsy shop in November, (fingers tightly crossed behind my back) so my first attempt was to try my hand at book binding....
Bookbinding crash course
Oh wow what a journey this one was, my fingers don't seem to take orders from my own brain anymore but just do their own thing, (age??)
Having learnt that one way to cover a book is to use fabric, I decided to get a small amount printed from a company called Prinfab who print your work onto different types of fabric, I chose a poly cotton fabric and bought a fat quarter, which is 70cm x 50cm
The fabric is beautiful, but I knew when I saw it that it probably wasn't right for this job, anyway I carried on.
The image was a repeat pattern of 2 of my lovely ladies, and the company Prinfab have a piece of software that creates a repeat patter for you.
I bought all the tools I needed, they all looked like they had been found on the ark it even came with a bone folder...not a real bone I can assure you :)
I also needed a lot of paper and some really stiff card for the cover, plus PVA glue and a lot of imagination and courage. Oh almost forgot the lady on the Youtube video said I needed iron interfacing to allow me to use the fabric as book fabric .
So I started to fold the paper, then sew it all together all was going well, I thought, until I began to glue the ends that would be the spine. I realised I didn't have the right kind of fabric to allow the glue to adhere well enough, but I still carried on.
Hours passed, or was it days, but I carried on.
Then came the moment where I had to cover the card ( this would be the book cover )in my beautiful fabric, to be honest the fabric wasn't looking that great at this moment, as the iron on interfacing hadn't glued well in places and it looked kind of saggy in areas.
So using loads of PVA glue I began sticking the fabric and card together, wow what a mess, the PVA seeped through the fabric and didn't stick that well to it, it was a total mess.
I left it to dry over night, hoping that magic elves would appear like in the elves and the shoemaker, alas they didn't and I was left with a really dodgy looking "book cover"
So I didn't even stick the two together as I knew at that moment I was no bookmaker, or I would be if I practiced over a lot of years. Plus the length of time it took to create one book (can I actually call it a book?) was far to long, I would end up been a slave to the books and that wasn't my overall objective, it was to create things quickly that wold sell well so I could carry on with my Art empire. So lesson learnt ....
BOOKMAKING 1 DAWN 0
So next week I will be trying something a little less time consuming and I will be creating a tissue box cover, (crossing fingers and toes)
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