Tuesday, June 5, 2012

I like tooling but I'm not a tool

You guys, tooling is SO MUCH FUN.  It is also sort of nerve-wracking and frustrating and when you screw up, you screw up big and it is almost impossible to fix.  But still.  FUN TIMES.  Today we made practice-book spines so that we can practice titling and lines on the curvy weirdness that is the spine of a book.  Basically we just put a bit of leather on a bit of wood and that was that.  Then we TOOLED IT.  There's a lot of planning that goes into it, especially the titling--what font do you use, what size, how will the words be arranged, etc.  There's a lot of measuring and figuring out and pattern making--so much so that when you finally go to put the bit of hot metal to the leather, it feels like, wait, what?  Now I just DO it?  All that preparation, and it still comes down to Oh man oh man I WISH MY HANDS WOULD STOP SHAKING.
These are the letter tools.  Apparently there are all kinds of ways to do lettering, and we are going to tackle them all.  This first kind is called Hand Lettering, because you do each letter individually by hand. It opens the door to lots of issues in letter spacing and possibilities of serious skewage, but Don says he likes it best of all the ways because it has the most character. :)  Don continues to be awesome and adorable, btw.

Here's my fake book, complete with fake raised cords. 

That white thing is the paper pattern for the lettering.  You do all the font size and spacing figuring out on a piece of paper, and then do like a dry run on a square of paper that is the same size as on the book, and then you tape it on and do the actual tooling through the paper.  You just have to press really hard to make sure it goes nice all the way through the extra layer.

Here is the set up with all my letters on the stove getting nice and hot.  At this stage, we were doing 'blind tooling,' which is when you press something into the board but you leave just the impression--no colored foil or gold leaf or anything. 

Et voile!!  You were supposed to practice with the title of one of your real books, so here is a fake precursor to Pelham! You guys, I am so excited to do Pelham for realsies, I have been messing with that book for OVER A YEAR. 

Um here is another angle.  Ir is blurry on purpose.

Oh snap!!  This is fake Pelham after I gold foiled lines around all his fake bands!!  Who knew it was so hard to make straight lines?  I had no idea.  About half of these I did, they came out totally blurred or bowed or slanty, so I scraped the gold off and did it over.  Right now in our practicey stage we are using gold foil, which is not real gold, so it is okay to shiz it up all the time.  I still think it looks pretty though, although apparently it goes a bit green over time.  Oh well

And here is where I left it for the day--all set up to go back over the blind tooled letters with gold foil.  I did the P and it sort of sucked so I decided to come back to it fresh in the morning.  This is a situation where if little elves came in the night and finished my work for me, I would be ok with that. 

4 comments:

Karen said...

I LOVE the gold lines! It looks so distinguished and REAL!

Christy said...

It looks great!! Love your lettering. Thanks for all the pics:)

mateicho1 said...

It kinda sounds dumb to have this be my whole comment, but I'm impressed. You really are delving deeply into the art of tooling those book spines...

Ashley Marie said...

Tool it up Katy, tool. it. up.