Here's a new experiment! Have you ever heard of vellucent bindings? You should look them up! The basic concept is that a delicate hand-painted cover is drawn on a piece of parchment and used to cover a book. Then a paper-thin translucent layer of vellum is sealed on top, protecting and preserving the art, and adding a gorgeous hazy overlay effect. If I understand properly, the art can also be drawn on the back side of the vellum. And this can also be done to cover inset art panels, but I really wanted to go for that whole-book effect. However, even before I became double extra broke, parchment and animal vellum are exponsive materials. Baby, we're doing this with printer paper and paper vellum.
So here are the goods! The Triumph of Time by @sunderedstar is one of my all-time favorite fics by one of my all-time favorite authors, and is still the idw1 ending that lives in my heart. Plus, the author commissioned a piece of art for each finished longfic, all of which are GORGEOUS and vibrant and just begging for that hazy overlay effect.
This was a major experiment! I cannot overstate how much I was flying blind here, and the only instructions I had were for finicky materials that I wasn't using myself. And then paper vellum turned out to be impressively finicky too! I had to redo my first case from scratch, and I was making notes on tweaks to the process all the way up through this morning. It's a mixed success, but I adore it, and I'm delighted with how well it turned out given what a gamble it was. And it wasn't an expensive experiment at all. I badly need to give my hands a break asap, but I definitely plan to repeat this experiment soon, and that will include at least one more round with this beloved series, now that the typeset is up to my current standards :D
