I’ve completed my first zine type photobook which features my recent ‘Tone & Balance’ photographic project. I now have a collection of studio portraits of musicians that work well in a photobook. I’ve had the internal pages printed and I’ve hand bound the pages into a hand made cover.
It was a very interesting and creative process which I really enjoyed, I used colour matched thread to bind the internal leaves to the cover. My photobook has four centre spreads where I’ve had the images printed full width and full bleed to use all available space for these images.
My process of binding the page leaves into the cover material by hand formed the internal pages, each set of leaves gave me four pages. I bound five of these page groups in to the cover to make my twenty page photobook.
I created an over sized cover which was trimmed to size following the binding process, this worked well and gives a custom look and feel to my book. Below is how my finished book looks with the trimmed cover, the book can be laid flat to view the centre spread images.
I created a stencil from original artwork that I designed, this is based on the ‘Tone & Balance’ project title. I created this stencil using design software which I then printed to form the stencil. I then used the stencil to hand paint the cover using acrylic paint which is flexible and suitable for cover artwork.
I used a light wash of paint to create an outline on the book’s cover, I then used this outline to hand paint the finished cover artwork.
Above is my finished book, I’m pleased with how this photobook has come together. It was a really enjoyable creative process which I encourage anyone to try. If you have a set of photographs or a body of work that you would like to archive I can’t recommend this enough as an enjoyable and creative process.
If this you would be interested in buying this unique and hand made photobook get in touch to find out more.