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.

Once dried I joined each pairs of pages pages with glue since I wanted to sew them later.

And then when the glue was set I folded them all in half to make the first section of the text block.

Since the pages of the book that are seen on the show are not many and there isn’t an official book yet  and I needed a new sketchbook I decided to bulk up the text block with two more sections. A white drawing paper part and a mid tone paper section for practicing drawing lights. 

Here is the sketchbook i used to make the white-paper part:

Each sheet folded in half:

And here is the mid tone paper, folded in half as well:

And here are the 3 parts of the book, the first part with the pages of the show, the second with regular drawing paper and the last with a mid tone paper for drawing with light colors:

After having all the paper ready I assembled 4-sheet signatures and made holes in all of them in my punching cradle:

Holes done!, time to sew!

You can use your preferred sawing method to put them together. Here is a fantastic list of tutorials on sewing books! I really like this one.

I also added a very nice textured thin cardboard as the beginning and end of the text block:

And the text block is ready for glue!

I use gauze on the spine to hold everything together:

After that I cover the text block with a plastic bag , sandwich the whole thing between a couple sheets of MDF and clamp it to dry.

And the text block is done! Next time we start with the covers and their many.. MANY decorations…