February 2015 - Week 3 Content Creation

The challenge with creating this book is in having the paper be strong enough to carry the weight of the thin spiral forms.

I decided to go with glue several pieces of paper together.  It would have been possible to just use  thick (300lb.) watercolour paper but I felt the glue between the sheets of paper would be stronger than just thick paper.

I will only be showing the process for the color red.  It is the same process for the other colours, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.

Creating the Pages

I started first with crumpling the paper, then glued four sheets together.  And then set the pages under a weight to dry.  It does take a couple of days for the sheets to dry.

Here's the result-

I added the crumpling to add some texture.  It also meant I didn't have to struggle so much making sure everything was aligned and not puckering.

Then, using my templates, I marked, traced and cut out all the shapes.

Using straight right out of the tube acrylic colour, I paint each page the colour needs to be.  In this case, it was red.

Using straight from the tube colour is rarely recommended.  But I want the consistency and visual look to the colour that can only come from straight from manufacturing.

Now, what you can't see is some more strengthening of paper I felt I need to do.  So I also added a layer of Clear Acrylic Top Coat spray and a layer of Mod Podge.

If when I'm binding the book, I feel the strength still isn't strong enough. I will adhere each page with a clear acetate sheet.  But I'm feeling very confident in the strength right now, so I will let you know next week if I had to add the extra support.

The last step was to add a central circle to each page.

It represents the light and will serve as a guide to align up all the pages.


The same process was done to create all the other pages.

Next week, the binding of book.

Until then, Happy Book Binding!

Sheila