THE BOOK PLAN PROGRESSES

"a cosmic experiment"

Pictured above is the mock up booklet I pieced together.

Note: "mock up" means a general idea of the concept, there are things that need to changed on a final, fooling around to see what works.

Now that I've gotten that established I can say a little about the booklet. The book has two signatures. Each signature has two sheets folded in half which means there are 8 pages. The whole booklet has sixteen pages. The signatures are sewn into the wrap around cover. The third picture shows the pleat in the cover paper where each signature is sewn through. Kind of hard to explain so you'll have to take my word for it. That purple strip down the middle is a pleat in the cover. The left image is the last page of the first signature and the right image is the first page of the second signature. Too technical? Just enjoy the colors and don't worry about the book construction. If I get a gazillion requests for the construction instructions, maybe I'll blog that too.

The images above show you five of the pages. I found that the wonderful intense color of the design made it difficult to write words so they are readable. Dang! I'm going to have to tone down the color so the black writing shows up better. Or, I could write some pages in white. I'll experiment with it but I'm not sure that will be a solution that works well. Or, I could forget the quotations and people can just enjoy the color of the pages! I'm not sure what I'll do.

I wrote the words with a black Pitt Pen size small. I think I'd like it better if I wrote with a edged nib. That's not quite as quick and dirty but it would probably look better than mono line.

I'm a little nervous about writing on the "good" pages. I worry I'll not space correctly and run out of space before the quotation is finished. I could do an overlay with layout paper. But then it looses the spontaneity of scribbling into the little journal book. Maybe it's gone beyond being just a little personal book and I need to be more planned and careful. Hummm......I have two complete sets to dabble in. I can always make more if I goof up. Right? And as I learned in my class at the calligraphy conference in California, "there's always gesso." I can just gesso over it and write again! I can do this!

I do really like the texture of the double center spread which is the second image above. I like it covering the whole universe, opps, I meant page. I like the black guide lines that repeat down the page. I'm also happy about the size of the book. There was space for almost all of the quotations I can wanted to include. The ones that got left out weren't my top choices for this book anyway. I was able to write in all of my favorites. That in itself was satisfying. This little book actually holds a galaxy of text. By the way the final size of the book is open flat 6 1/2" X 5 3/4 and closed, size of one page is 3 1/4" X 5 3/4". It's pretty small.

By the way, I have wonderful covers for the other two final versions. I painted more papers that are the same style as the pages.

More to come. I don't know just when but am excited to go play with them.