Making the Final Book

For making the book, I have decided to use stitching to bind the pages together.

I began with 3 pieces of A3 multicoloured card that I bought from Ryman's stationary, and folded them together to create the style of an A4 book. Then, I used a thin but sharp needle with black thread, to bind all of the pages together.

A3 pages folded into A4 sized pages ready to be bound after making sure all the pages were neatly aligned.

Before I began stitching, I marked out where I wanted the thread to go, so I would have a rough idea of where the needle entry holes, and thread will be positioned. I equally spaced out the gaps through precise measurement with a ruler, to create a professional looking book. After this I carefully bound the pages together, which I tied very strongly, to make the book as secure as possible. I am really happy with how I did this, and I am very sure the book will be durable.

The fine stitching that is directly in the centre of the page spine.

You can see in the image above, how the thread is aligned perfectly with the spine.
After I made sure all of the stitching held together, and that everything was as planned, I moved on to attaching the cover, which contains the base for the planned book cover design. The cover consists of a different card than the pages, and is white card, that has been covered in light blue ink using a sponge. The card has been carefully measured and cut, as well as glued using spray adhesive, using extreme care.

(image here)

The book cover consists of a simple light blue background, with a small, cut centred illustration of a husky dog in a rough shape of the letter 'm'. The image was coloured using watercolour paint, in my 'pastel' tone colour scheme, and through this illustration, I hoped it would represent the style of drawings that will be inside.

The front cover watercolour husky illustration, as a work in progress (WIP)

The almost completed front cover, with the husky painting cut out, and placed onto the card.

The insides of the pages contain an individual theme, to the illustration being placed, alongside the actual letter that the drawing is trying to convey. The slight exception is the double page below, that uses a shared theme. I explain this in the text below, that is with the image.

Two pages that shared the same colour due to the binding style. To avoid a clash of contrast, I used animals that roughly shared a similar environmental habitat. So in this case, I could use a shared leafy type of theme. This now looks like a continuous flowed theme, and I am really happy that I managed to make these two images work so well side by side.

Thomas.