Owen's Chivalric Quest Book: Part IV

Covering the boards with the white leather went pretty well.  The wheat paste didn't attach well to the ends of the perg paper, so I'll need to look into other glues and see what will work better.  But, even for that, the book seems nice and sturdy.

Pasting the outside down.

Pasting the turn-ins.

Getting ready to paste down the end papers.

Finished book.

Owen's Chivalric Quest Book: Part III

The book board were another challenge.  My first attempt I only dug channels in the inside for the supports to go; this time I drilled and chiseled out channels going through the boards to lace the supports through the boards.

Channels cut through the book boards.

Supports laced to the book boards and attached.

 It was touch to get the draw knife started when trimming the pages.  I see why the draw knife was eventually dropped for a book binders plow. 

Pages trimmed to the boards.

End bands sewn in

Owen's Chivalric Quest Book: Part II

The binding process made me nerviness.  We had spent so many hours working on all of those sheets and now I had to punch holes in them and cut them to shape eventually.  While I did the binding, Nic work on the brass clasps.

Punching holes in the gatherings was the point I was at my most nerviness. After that, it was a lot easier to do what I had to, to turn the gatherings into a book.

Punching holes in the gatherings.

Sewing frame all set up.

Sewing the first gathering on.

 I did manage to stab the tips of a few fingers while doing the sewing, drawing only a little blood each time, so bleeding on this project was kept to a real minimum.

All finished.

Owen's Chivalric Quest Book: Part I

Owen's Chivalric Quest Book has been completed and presented, so I'll be getting into it's creation and process.

You can find a documentation write up, here.

Once all the calligraphy was finished, we started drawing the illumination part of the project.  We did a page with miniatures at the start of each section, and every page of calligraphy received at least a boarder.  In total there are 170 pages that were drawn on and painted.

Adding Drawings.

 We mixed our own paints, besides for the gold.  It would have saved some time and fussiness if we had gone with store bought paint for all of our colors.  We went through two to three batches of paint for the major colors.

Nic mixing pigments to paint.

We painted the base colors on each page.  If I had the space I would paint one side of every sheet in a gathering at a time.  By the end of the project, we had figured out how to assembly line the illumination.

base painted areas

Drawing the black lines around the painted areas made it look really dark.  We ended up having to remind ourselves many times that the white work would make it look better.

outlined in black

 Adding the white work brought everything together.  This the the stage we started getting excited about how things were turning out.

Finished sheet.