Wednesday 4 February 2009

Water Book



Towards the end of last year Designer Bookbinders organised an international competition, being a fellow of D B, I was encouraged to enter. The title of the book is Water and is series of works about... wait for it.....water.
So here is my offering.



Reduction Lino cuts for the end papers. Fun to do and simple-ish.



Hand sewn endbands with edge decoration in blue and gold leaf.




Edge to edge doublers, these have been worked on the book to give the feeling of water worn wood.



The leather is hand dyed with over 1,500 individual impressions. That took some time to do, I suppose it is a sort of trad binding for me. The design is based on the Golden Temple in Kyoto. Rain Falling on the decorative carp in the surrounding lake.
The surface of the leather was then worked with a fine wire wool, leaving the gold in the impressions ( Hand Tooled ) and residue of the gold left in place to enhance the ripple effect.Small inlays in the boards and doublers echo the water drop on the end papers.



I like the finished result, fun to do and something of a challenge as I do not usually work with gold leaf in this way.

4 comments:

Taghound said...

Hi Mark!
I have to say your binding of Water is really stunning!

I love the design and admire the determination you have shown doing such accurate work.

I am not sure I know what 'reduction linocuts' are but the effect is terific.

Congatulations!

Taghound

Anonymous said...

Thank you for the comments. I have to say it did take bit longer than I first thought.

Reduction Lino prints or cuts; In the reduction process, successive cuts are made in the same block, and a new colour is printed at various stages. The printing may be considered easier than multi block colour printing, as it may be easier to register the one block. But the block is gradually destroyed by the continuing work. You have to be very confident about how much of the surface to be removed for each printing.

Easy really, have a go !

Paper dragon books said...

that lino cut is so good it makes me sick...

Paper dragon books said...

mark

how did you get such a defined line , where you laid the gold on , and what did you use to stick it down
the binding`s great , i`ve noticed you`ve doing a lot of painted skin , if you are using the fair goat for that it`s really quite good isn`t...
and the sanded japanese paper doublure
...another invention??
love the dots , the red one especially
mind boggling linocut , reductions are hard , i`m not sure ive the brain to visualise ahead of time and backwards!!!