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Making book
May. 25th, 2017 03:50 pmWas going to put together the book part of the sculpture last night, but got distracted by television. Denise and I have been watching season 3 of Leverage on DVD, and got to the final two episodes. So we binged them both, then went back and watched 'em again with the commentary on. So I wrapped up the slabs tight, and left them for this afternoon.
I decided to use a lighter clay for the pages, a porcelaneous stoneware called G-Mix, which is available with a little grog for sculpting. My original plan was to use my standard stoneware, DSW, for the covers, but I wasn't sure whether the rates of shrinkage were the same, so opted for the safer solution, using one clay for the whole piece. I'll have to wipe some stain on the cover to darken it down, but that's not too much trouble.
Denise is a book binder, so I know quite a bit about the structure of books from watching her at work. This helped with details like the shape of the cover boards, the curve of the pages when open, the headband on the inside of the spine. I had such good luck pre-texturing my slabs on the dinosaur that I did it again, using the canvas texture from my slab roller to simulate book cloth. I've got several rubber-stamp alphabets, so chose a funky, slightly old-fashioned font to impress the title.
The title? Okay, I admit, Jurassic Park would have been the obvious choice, but I didn't want to be that obvious. I decided to make it a kid's picture book, and "Big Book of Dinosaurs" was just the right length. I wanted it to be kind of old and dated, the sort of book I read in third grade, with an embossed brontosaur (dated, right?) on the front cover, and volcanos on the back.
Once I'd trimmed and rounded the edges, using a scrap of canvas to re-texture, I built the pages. I've got a fluted butter paddle that, dragged along the slab, made a tolerable text-block edge, so I laid down top, bottom and sides, plus a rib in the middle to keep the page from collapsing, then scored, slipped, and laid the smooth page-slab over the top. Repeat for the other side, making sure the curve of the page block is a little different. Don't want the book to be too symmetrical.
Once the two halves were finished, I joined them together along the gutter, with a little coil reinforcement both inside and out. Since each half had two hollow chambers, I drilled holes venting them to the spine. I ran five bits of slab perpendicular across the back of the spine, for added support, then trimmed it flat and attached the cover to the spine, finessing the seams with the canvas scrap. Two curved coils simulated the headbands on the top and bottom, and left a gap where I could run a bamboo skewer down the inside of the spine, venting all the trapped air spaces.
I'll wait until after the bisque firing to decide what goes on the pages. Big pictures, I think, readable headlines but Greek text (it's a term from my printing days. In this case, I'll either do nonsense squiggles or just grey stripes) for the body copy. I'm thinking Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus...
I decided to use a lighter clay for the pages, a porcelaneous stoneware called G-Mix, which is available with a little grog for sculpting. My original plan was to use my standard stoneware, DSW, for the covers, but I wasn't sure whether the rates of shrinkage were the same, so opted for the safer solution, using one clay for the whole piece. I'll have to wipe some stain on the cover to darken it down, but that's not too much trouble.
Denise is a book binder, so I know quite a bit about the structure of books from watching her at work. This helped with details like the shape of the cover boards, the curve of the pages when open, the headband on the inside of the spine. I had such good luck pre-texturing my slabs on the dinosaur that I did it again, using the canvas texture from my slab roller to simulate book cloth. I've got several rubber-stamp alphabets, so chose a funky, slightly old-fashioned font to impress the title.
The title? Okay, I admit, Jurassic Park would have been the obvious choice, but I didn't want to be that obvious. I decided to make it a kid's picture book, and "Big Book of Dinosaurs" was just the right length. I wanted it to be kind of old and dated, the sort of book I read in third grade, with an embossed brontosaur (dated, right?) on the front cover, and volcanos on the back.
Once I'd trimmed and rounded the edges, using a scrap of canvas to re-texture, I built the pages. I've got a fluted butter paddle that, dragged along the slab, made a tolerable text-block edge, so I laid down top, bottom and sides, plus a rib in the middle to keep the page from collapsing, then scored, slipped, and laid the smooth page-slab over the top. Repeat for the other side, making sure the curve of the page block is a little different. Don't want the book to be too symmetrical.
Once the two halves were finished, I joined them together along the gutter, with a little coil reinforcement both inside and out. Since each half had two hollow chambers, I drilled holes venting them to the spine. I ran five bits of slab perpendicular across the back of the spine, for added support, then trimmed it flat and attached the cover to the spine, finessing the seams with the canvas scrap. Two curved coils simulated the headbands on the top and bottom, and left a gap where I could run a bamboo skewer down the inside of the spine, venting all the trapped air spaces.
I'll wait until after the bisque firing to decide what goes on the pages. Big pictures, I think, readable headlines but Greek text (it's a term from my printing days. In this case, I'll either do nonsense squiggles or just grey stripes) for the body copy. I'm thinking Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus...
