Sketchbook Project 2012 - Part 2

This is the second half of my Monochromatic book for Art House Co-op's Sketchbook Project 2012. Here's the first half.

Mailed it in today and I am entirely pleased with how it turned out! It's weird to think this little book I have dedicated so many months to is going away and I probably won't be seeing it again for a long time (if at all.)

The covers I am especially happy with since I haven't done much hand lettering in my illustrations and outside of my sketchbooks. These were really fun to do.

Front cover. Spine reinforced with paper-backed bookbinding cloth.

Back cover.

Small reinforcement. 

02-03

04-05

06-07

24-25

26-27

28-29

30-31

I left these blank as pseudo endpapers.

Lengthy, behind-the-scenes explanation Part 2:


Something I didn't mention in my last post is the cut pages. Did you notice that? Look at pages 03-06, they are all cut so you can see through into the next page. Cutting added another dimension to the project that I could not have achieved with just drawing. It allowed me to base my designs around the cutting and it influenced what I drew, so that the underlying drawing could be appreciated equally on all pages.

I started just cutting wherever and accepting whatever would appear on the other side (as seen in pages 13-18,) but eventually I became more thoughtful of what I wanted to achieve with the cuts.  I wanted the viewer to experience: 1) that you will see the same strokes repeatedly, but they become an entirely different drawing as you flip the pages, and 2) that just because cutting through the sheet means that both pages will have the same skeleton does not mean that they will look the same.

For instance, see how plain and simple 02 is, but without those strokes, 04 wouldn't be half as awesome as it is (it's one of my favourites.)

If I participate on next year's Sketchbook Project I'm thinking of concentrating more heavily on the cutting and less on the drawing.

As for the darker, stained edges on the paper, those were a happy accident. When I was toning the pages, I waited for them to dry enough so that they wouldn't stick together, some stayed a little damp and eventually the paint started pooling on the edges. Once I noticed it was happening, I intentionally painted the remaining pages in such a way that the stains would become more prominent (as seen on page 26 where I went a bit overboard.)

Here's some highlights:

07 - one of my favourites. I love how the negative space makes a path around the strokes and how the gradient from the toning in the pages interacts with the path. At the beginning when I toned all the pages, this one worried me a tad because I accidentally put too much Burnt Umber into the mix, so this would be the ONE page that looked brown whilst the others were yellow but it all turned out great in the end!

25 - shows what happens when I do thumbnails for illustrations and I'm either out of ideas or don't particularly feel like doing thumbnails. I find some of my favourite doodles happen when doing entirely unrelated work.

26 - There's a horse on the top left. (And a dog with a bow tie on the bottom left of Page 18.)

31 - as the last page, I left it plain and simple to mirror the beginning page, which was also plain and simple.