Making a Book

My fiancé is big into horror. He loves watching it, reading it, writing about it. He even tries to encourage me to try out a few horroresque type drawings…Too Bad Hunny, I don’t do scary…so I thought. Since he is a very talented writer, he has been considering having a few of his short stories published. Unfortunately circumstance has made us have to postpone it for a little while, to cheer him up I decided he didn’t have to wait to have his stories in a book. I started designing a way to make him a book that would compliment his stories. Something that would match his dark writing style.
When referring to creepy books, one comes to mind, the Necronomicon, ya know the Book from Evil Dead. No I wasn’t going to make him a book that summoned evil spirits but I was looking for the cover to be creepy like that.
The task began by printing about 12 of his stories off. I changed the font to “Parchment” an old Archaic looking font. After adding small sketches to a few of the pages I then printed them off front and back. I then started the tedious task of staining the pages. I wanted to give them an old, weathered look like ancient books have. Each page, there was about 60 of them, was carefully brushed with a wet tea bag. Interesting tip I learned while staining, regular tea gives you a yellow stain but flavored tea gives you a grayish stain. Yes I probably could’ve just gone to a printing store and printed it on yellow paper but I also wanted that weathered look you get from the wet pages after they dry. Stapled all the stories together along with a cover page and index, now it was ready for the cover.

Don’t want this Blog to be too long so I’ll tell you all about what I did next in my next blog. Stay Tuned :)
~Caralyn