Category Archive

Now its time to paint the cover: The install the corners: And add the leather straps to the back: Once that is done it´s time to actually put all the decorations in place and nail them: And the last detail comes next time!

I initially thought of making all the gemstones from the book out of resin and trying to paint them with some sort of transparent paint but after several days of doubts I just decided to find some real stones.  I luckily found this offensive piece of “jewelry” which had the exact shape of stones I needed and a very acceptable hue of purple! I cut the necklaces and selected the best stones: The actually look great! I used the stones just as they were for the cover part but the stone on the side needed to be a bit smaller so i cut it with a grinder. Then made a small wooden circle to put it in: All ready to go to assembly! See you all next time!

And here are some pics of the pieces from yesterday being painted! Here is the plain wood piece just sanded: And the painted with some woodstain: And finally with its golden decoration. It was done by first paragraphing a groove and then adding some golden nail polish: All ready! Next time we’ll build the last decorations before putting it all together! Bye! 

Whenever one adapts any prop from this kind of animation into reality there’s quite a lot of details that eventually have to be either invented or simply interpreted to your own taste. In this case, the first interpretation had to be the shapes of all the decorations on both covers of the book. They have many slightly different shapes across the screenshots I could find but in the end i decided to make a very symmetrical version of them all. I thought that just like the cartoons are stylized deformed versions of real humans, the shapes on the book are the same but in book version. Here is an image of the original flat open book with all the decorations I found over here.  It seems to me like the perspective is not quite right based on other screenshots I’ve taken but is absolutely fantastic reference material. So, here are my very symmetrical and exact version: I changed a bit the colors and printed out the complete page: I cut every part that will be cut and trace it with copy-paper into a think piece of wood: And then into the scroll saw: And then after some sanding the symbol … Read More

And thus it begins! After all the pages are done, we can now turn to the really complicated part… actually building the book. Step 1: Building the text block The first part was to build the text block. I already had the pages traced and printed so I took some photocopies of them so that I could age the page in water and don’t damage the drawings. The I used my usual aging process and placed the paper in water with fabric dye for a 10 or 20 seconds. Then let all pages dry out over plastic. I never use an actually flat surface because the small pools of water leave a lot of marks and dark spots on the pages that I really like.

After a very long weekend of inking, we are just about done with the pages. Here are 4 more pages, this week I´ll finish the remaining 3 and then comes the actual build of the book! As always, all the pages I traced are ready for download on the Star vs the Forces of Evil download page!