Words & Letters - a smallish art book. No, really

I'm staring another art book, but this one is going to be a pretty small project. It's the one that lead to this piece as I was planning it out. It will be another star book, all the black and white.

I wanted to do something on old book pages, and really like the Roman alphabets with all the lines and circles around them showing to make the letters. However, I didn't want to just to an alphabet book. So I decided to but some quotes in with them. I was going to just do random quotes about words and writing, kind of like an old sketch I did way way back. I can't it, but here's an abstract (ish) painting based on it, which might give you the idea:

This time around I wanted the quotes to have a bit more coherence. So I tookt he quote I liked most, "Words, words, words" from Hamlet and expanded it to include a few of the lines around it as well.

Close-up of the pages. There is one letter and one quote per layout. This is the back layer, and the others will be cut-out so you can see into this one. It's based on a square, because the letters are. The quote is smooshed into the same shaped. I didn't really use calligraphy for the quote, what I did was trace the outline of the letters and scribble inside to (mostly) fill them in. I love it with a little 'sketch'-like quality to it, rather than a more polished finished product.

When the separate pages where done I threw them all on the floor and decided on the order they would go in (see the top photo). The quotes and alphabet to go in order, but I didn't want them to simply alternate (letter on the left, quote on the right) so I played with it a bit until I was happy.

Then they all got cut out and glued to nice stiff paper to finish it off. I ripped the 'H' when I was putting it on, but that turned out to be a good thing because it was a boring letter and I replaced it with a more intricate 'K' instead.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - a new, smaller project

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams. --William Butler Yeats

Welcome to my next calligraphy book project. I like how The Tell-Tale Heart turned out, so I'm having another go. Only this time instead of a story I'm only doing a very short poem. I want to keep this well under two months! I also want to try a different type of book. I've never really done much in the way of different types of books, and it's about time. So this one will be a star book, a bit like this:

This star ornament is from fellow Bookbinding Etsy Street Team member KupoKiley, and you can find it here.

I've been try to work out the look and materials and different layers etc. I'm finding it a bit hard to get a handle on exactly what I want to do with it. This sketch is the closest I've come to an actual plan:

I have a basic feel I want to achieve, sort of a dark Art Nouveau look, a bit Gothic and Edwardian filigree and things like that. The trouble is finding paper - nice dark blue paper seems hard to come by, which makes it hard to stick with the 'night' theme, and I want heavy paper to do cutouts that can then stand up on display. Plus, it's three dimensional, so all the paper has to be as pretty on the reverse side as the front. I will probably end up making or glueing most of it, I'm kind of thinking. So much for this being a simple project! I choose a short poem, so some part of me is compensating by making everything else more complicated.

This is the paper for the outside layer, the one that will have the actual poem on it. It's my favourite technique - layers of calligraphy (the poem, of course) over and over until it's unreadable. I also put a couple of washes on top to give a more uniform background for the proper calligraphy. I'm going to use gold gouache on top with loads of little flourishes. Behind that will be a few layers of cut out writing, and maybe some transparent paper if it fits with the them. The back layer will have the title and author, done in masking fluid with this type of calligraphy on top - kind of the exact reverse of this page. Or something. We'll see what I figure out!

The Tell-Tale Heart - planning

Here's a quick glimpse into my sketchbook for the Tell-Tale Heart project. After figuring out the basic imagery and deciding what size my watercolour paper would neatly fold into, I started drawing out the book itself.


A page for fonts. Art Nouveau on the left, Gothic variations on the right. And then my scribbles as I try to figure out how to combine the two.


This is my first draft, so to speak, of what a finished page will look like. The background scribbles, drips, and colours I like, but the font was still very Art Nouveau and much too pretty to be appropriate.

So I tried it again in the font that I ended up deciding on. Imagine this, but with the red opening letter, and muted background. I've penciled in the cut out bottom corner as well.


I planned out the entire book on tracing paper. The page layout is the same on all of them, so it's on one sheet (so I don't have to draw and erase pencil lines on each sheet), and the text itself is all planned out on these sheets (because the spacing and layout is all odd and different) ahead of time. I'm going to be using a light table, and basically just trace all of this onto the proper sheets.

This is where it's advantageous that I work in a boring store no one ever come into. There's no way I would have this all done, or possibly ever finish, if I'd started it at home only a week ago.

Here's the layout so I know how many pages, signatures etc there will be total, and what pages go together. The paper will be 90lb cold press, so decently thick enough that there will only be 2 pages per signature. This is to help me keep track of everything, since the folding pages mean the consecutive pages will actually be on different sheets, and it's easy to get it all mixed up.


Not that I really needed anything, but I popped in The Paper Umbrella because it's fabulous, and ended up finding some paper I had to have. Surprise! But sarcasm aside, this is a terrific find. The dark red colour is close to that of blood and it has raised ridges that look like veins. It also has woven threads visible on the back side. So I can't use this two-sided but I may take advantage and 'unravel' or 'fray' the edges. It could look cool, not to mention work well with the entire 'narrator loses his sanity' theme.