Workin’ like crazy on Medicine Dan, my newest Artist’s book. I feel like I’m gaining momentum, finally. 

There’s still lots and lots to do—I don’t even have enough work done to make two of the five signatures yet, but I’m getting close. I could essentially make the very first signature, but nothing gets sewn until the very end when I bind everything together. Also, the last signature has the colophon in it, and that keeps changing as I go along with the project.

Since I finished the layouts on the computer, I’ve been trying to get all the drawings and watercolors done, both the ones that will be printed and the original ones that go in the book. So, that requires printing some of the pages I’ll be painting on. I wish I could do the whole thing like an easy assembly line, but I can only do some of it like that, like these watercolors I did today. Doing eight in a row is kinda tedious. 

Making one drawing or one painting that gets printed is a lot easier and, frankly more satisfying. 

I have yet to make fifteen more watercolor paintings in total and eight little “drawings.” The drawings are easy peasy. They’re just one-color colored pencil drawings of a helicopter. Then, I can start cutting paper and printing the rest of the sheets. The sheets are 7.5 x 12 inches (because the book size is 7.5 x 6 inches). Four pages to a sheet. Make sense?

I’m working on seven more of these pages now:

Next, I may make a few little scribbles on some of the pages for more “originality,” and I’m rubberstamping the back sides of the imported paper. I made a custom stamp of Dan that looks like this:

I have a few butterflies I’ll be using as well. Awww, how adorable.

After that, I gotta cut some thick handmade paper that I’m using to assemble little pouches. I’ll glue them to one of the pages. This pocket will hold three or four Dan stickers in each book. 

Before I start scoring and folding book pages, I’ll be sewing three pieces of felt onto two different pages. One is a heart in two pieces. It will be stitched around the edges, and then mended in the middle. The other is in the shape of Dan (also stitched around his edge), who also needs two grommet holes poked through both the felt and the paper to make his eyes. I have a feeling my hand is going to hurt, grabbing the grommet tool as hard as I can sixteen times! Eeek.

If I think my hands will hurt grommeting, I don’t want to think about exacerbating my arthritis embroidering and binding the covers. The only thing I can say is that the fact that the look of the books will feel so rewarding, I won’t give two shits about the pain.

Both the embroidery and the binding thread are white. It will contrast the dark-ish blue cover. I think it will look pretty cool. I’m still debating on some type of presentation box. My brain is still working that out. I think it needs more of a slip-clover, but I wish it could be clear somehow. I want the cover of the book and the binding to be seen through it and not wasting away in a covered box. Isn’t that a song?