A Book a Day? What's Up With That?


Hi, and welcome to this year-long project. So what's this all about and how did it happen, you might ask. In mid 2007, artist Noah Scalin decided to make a skull out of anything he could find, every day for a year. It stretched him in ways he never imagined, as an artist, a writer and a person. His experience turned into a blog that went viral, and then a book.

Others have picked up on the idea: 365 Hearts, 365 Masks, 365 Bears drawn on a cellphone, 365 paper napkin mustaches.
I wanted to play, too, and I chose books. I love books, I know a bit about making books (thanks to my talented book-maker sister, Marilyn Worrix), and they're broad enough in definition to give me a lot of creative leeway.

The whole point is not really the books. The idea is to stretch myself in many ways as an artist and a person, to set up a discipline, stick with it and see what that teaches me.

I hope you'll join with me and follow along on the journey chronicled here, and let me know what you think.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Day 90 - Gibson Girl - A Little Handbag Notepad

Today's book would be a handy little thing to carry around in your purse. It's a small notepad with a cardstock cover. The picture on the front is a Charles Dana Gibson illustration of a pretty girl writing a letter. In my photo editing program, I cut out the hand and pen part of the image and then printed that on the top of every page in the pad.

This a good example of "perfect binding," where the pages are stacked and one edge is glued with a special glue called a padding compound. In this kind of binding, it is crucial that the edge being glued is cut perfectly straight and very clean. Once the pad was glued, I simply printed the design onto cardstock, cut it to fit, folded it over the top, down over the back and up over the back bottom edge, then glued it to the chipboard backing the notepad. Done!

Simple, clean, handy. If I was in production mode, I could turn out a dozen or more of these in an hour.




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