The first step was to define the size of the book. I had a couple pieces of plywood that I bought to make shelves but never used so I decided to used that to make the covers since they looked quite similar to the size of book shown in the movie. So I took the width of that piece and calculated the height based on photos of other props. Always check you leftovers before making too many measurements, usually there’s something already perfect! Once the covers were ready, the next step pas to make the curved marks on them. I copied the very rough lines to a piece of paper based on a couple of photos of one of the many props floating on the internet. Then I copied it to the piece of plywood by hand, nothing to precise. Then I used the router head of the dremel and created the grooves on the cover. For the internal pages, I first started gathering photos of props. I much later realized that all pages from this book are supposed to be made out of obsidian or black stone, but I for some reason found these photos first: I really liked … Read More
The Book of the Dead from The Mummy (part 1)
The book we are making this time is the Book of the Dead from The Mummy (1999)!. The Book of the Dead from The Mummy has been in my to-do-list for a very long time, but I always thought I might be a bit too difficult to make. The whole clasps system looked a bit too fantastical to me. But, we actually got a request over Facebook asking if we could make a replica of it so we finally decided to at least start making a potential plan for building it. A couple of weeks later, we had a couple a reasonable plans and a list of materials so we started the build. In the end, the book was finished with a couple of parts missing, but you’ll will see all our misadventures on our next posts! The Book of the Dead References! As always the first par of any project is to gather some references. Sadly the movie doesn’t have quite enough shots of the prop to get much details so we based our replica on several other props that were floating on the internet. Here is a small compilation of the photos I used to start this build: … Read More
Necronomicon prop!
Here is a very cool looking replica made by LaboratorioDiEris which uses the pages I re-traced (from the Evil Dead reboot) and you can buy it from ETSY right now! I don’t make replicas for sell mainly because I sadly live in freaking south america and sending stuff overseas from here is SOOOO expensive that it just isn’t worth it for anyone =( but luckily here is a prop you can actually get. Here are some pics of the book. The aging of the pages looks fantastic! And it look VERY nicely bound. [su_table] [/su_table] Buy it from ETSY!
Star vs. the Forces of Evil Spellbook (Part 15) Covers
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!
Star vs. the Forces of Evil Spellbook (Part 14) Gemstones
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!
Star vs. the Forces of Evil Spellbook (Part 13) Painting decorations
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!
Star vs. the Forces of Evil Spellbook (Part 12) Making decorations
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
Star vs. the Forces of Evil Spellbook (Part 11) building the text block
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.
Star vs. the Forces of Evil Spellbook (Part 9)
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!