Wilder Art Book

Taking commissions doesn't come super naturally to me but when a good artist friend asked if I could make him a blank book that he intended to fill with drawings as a Christmas gift for his wife, I obviously accepted. We conspired on dimensions and papers and cloths for a while, and soon landed on some really beautiful materials from TALAS: a yellow buckram for the cover (to date, one of the most pleasant materials I've worked with), a heavy, textured paper with one deckled edge (a great substrate for the inks he often works with), and two options for endpapers (where our decisiveness failed).

The drawings aren't mine to share, but the blank book is, and it couldn't have turned out better. The deckled edge was, as they often are, a bit tricky to work with, and I had to tear half of them myself since the dimensions didn't allow me to use both ends from the parent sheets. This was the most worrisome part of the process, but I eventually developed a jig whereby I could apply just a bit of water with a small paintbrush to consistently get the desired deckle at the desired dimensions. The text block was sewn on tapes - I wanted it to be as robust as possible.