Call Me Menace & Villains Never Retire - wingedcat13
Four alterations of the same book that I had the joy to hand over in person as a surprise gift to @desmothene, @pleasantboat, @finalfrontierpublishing and @fantailpress on a meet-up this January.
Many thanks to @wingedcat13 for the permission to share her work.
Read the Call Me Menace here
and Villains Never Retire starting here.
Materials used
book case
boards - museum board (white)
counter pull layer on boards- museum paper (white)
spine stiffener - photo cardboard (white)
vellum (calf parchment) coloured with alcohol based stain - cover material
inner book
textblock paper - Schleipen fly 05 115gsm
endpapers - marbled paper by Renato Crepaldi
endbands - buttonhole silk
coloured top edge - chameleon acrylic ink
A few WIP shots of a project I’m trying a some things with.
In this I coloured the edges with watered down acrylic colours to match the cover paper to be.
I wedge the book block between (in this case very little) waste paper and let them stick out a bit so I can easier sand them. I started with the front edge and since this volume is pretty slim I used a pencil to get an nice and smooth shape.
Then I went for top and bottom edge. I fanned the waste paper there a bit to accomodate for the swell in the spine.
At some point I thought I was done, but then I noticed that small shadow close to the fore edge. There was a still an area not smooth enough to give an even colouring. So that meant more sanding until it was gone.
Still there is some discolouring close to the spine. This is the ‘weak’ spot pressure-wise. The swell does not allow for an even pressure and thus one often gets a darker coloured area because it is less smoothly sanded.
In the end I waxed the edges, which I have not done much before. They geta nice sheen, but I think next time I’d rather use a different cloth. I believe the one I had pressed some indentions into the edge and left light streaks.
gilding and colouring edges gone wrong, that’s what you get from being lazy
(pictures and description under the cut)
So I was learning how to gild edges with genuine leaf gold and picked the probably worst paper to work with. There were a lot of things going wrong to begin with. We sanded the edges from hand, but also with a belt sander, which actually a brilliant idea... if you are familiar using one, which was not.
So from sanding hollows and angles into the edge to polishing the gold too soon/ too late/ too lightly/ too firmly, I’m pretty sure I picked up every mistake and problem I could run into.
This blotchy and speckled looking edge was the best result I got in a row of much worse results, so I kept it.
There was also some smudging on the fore edge from gilding the head edge that still needed cleaning up (meaning sanding... I hate sanding the fore-edge because you have to do it by hand. There’s supposed to be a way using a cutting machine, but I don’t really know how to do that)
On a whim I decided, why not colouring the other edges to make it look a bit more exciting?
As I mentioned I’m lazy with sanding the edge, knowing the voluminous paper I had here I didn’t put as much effort and time in as I should have and this was the result
You can clearly see where I didn’t sand the edge smooth enough at the sides. The darker one here was the side I had on my side of the press so it was not as easy to apply pressure there. Not that one should apply more pressure in one direction than the other in the first place, but well...
(This is a picture from when I pressed the book in a second time for polishing (which one shouldn’t do either, but it was already fucked up anyway), not from the actual sanding and colouring process, hence the lack of paper to protect the press!)
Because it looked already uneven and sort of grunge I tried a wavy brush pattern which turns out to offer a nice moiré effect that I had not anticipated.
I ended up sanding the bottom edge even less and got ‘a not as smooth as I like but nicely coloured’ edge that has a nice sheen and touch after waxing and polishing it.
Tooling the gilded edge was surprisingly easy. I just printed a pattern I liked to fit the edge, placed it and traced the lines. The pattern wasn’t wide enough to cover all the messy parts of the edge and didn’t feel confident to add to the patter in a fitting pattern free hand so I just sort of blended in with some dots.
The cover-up had worked partially, I guess more uneven/ haphazard pattern might have been better than straight lines, but in general I’m pleased of how it turned out. The paper was shining off rather stark white and I toned it down a bit by smearing graphit from a pencil rub off on it.
