Leather inset/inlay on my clamshell box for Bionic Battle Granny
This was another design I hade in mind for that bind so I used it on the clamshell.
(Process and problems I ran into below the break)
I have no clear instruction on how to do a leather inlay or mosaic so I pretty much went with what felt like the thing to do.
For this I pared both, the covering leather and the inset to the same thickness. I dressed the case of the clamshell and let it dry completely.
With that step on the way I had time to prepare my inlay. I printed the design I had in mind. When I was still considering to print this I set the silhouette with the first note of the author instead of the title. Given that I have neither a font small enough nor the necessary amount of letters all at once and I really did not feel like setting world for word and, if necessary, letting the letters cool to keep working I switched to the title instead.
Now the difficult part was, that I wanted tos tick to the colour scheme and have a multicoloured print. To get that look I cut out a narrow line inside the print. Just enough to see where the colours needed to go, arranged all my differently coloured foils with a lot of tape and went on tooling more or less blindly and cut out the silhouette being very careful to have the colours still where I wanted them to go.
That done I realised... I forgot to upscale the size from the actual book to the cover of the clamshell and now Peggy looked very forlorn on that too large cover.
Given that the title was not as crisp as I would have wanted it to be, I tried for another two times to get it better. (I did not, each new attempt was actually worse XD)
But a fellow binder on the @renegadepublishing discord server, suggested a speech bubble to fill up the empty space which turned out to be a great idea. So I went with that and added the authors name there.
To bring the cut on the cover I traced it carefully with the pointed side of my leather bonefolder (which is just a regular, but tiny bonefolder) and cut the the leather inside out with a scalpel before pasting in the silhouette.
I had to re-adjust a bit and cut away some more of the dark leather as well as I ended up with small gaps, but I'm pretty pleased how it turned out (considering I had no idea how to do this 'properly').
Fortunately for me, the white leather does not reveal the gaps too much, but if I had to do it again and the inlay had a different colour I'd probably colour the cut out (after peeling of the leather there) in either the colour of the base leather or the inlay leather to avoid white flashing in the gaps.
Below is one of the fucked up larger versions (left) and the one I ended up doing (right). Here they are not cut out or pasted in, but just put on top of the case to check the look (the finished version has a somehow weirdly angled leg, but it's done now. Nothing to do about that)
