A Book Project - Part Two - Making a Book

Here I’m going to talk more about the process of making an artist book from scratch and my personal experience in this endeavour. For more info on the project, check out part one.

The English/Italian illustrator Sara Fanelli was also influential in this project, especially her book Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am, which was frequently consulted in the making of the final and new book. Here I had help, my teacher and her assistant, the latter having plenty of experience with producing books, were vital to the creation of this project. I think it’s very important if you’re considering making a book that you have people who know their stuff to consult on the practical matters, this is priceless compared to a ton of research. Stuff like the size of the book and the paper you print on can make or break your creation.

They also helped me select the interventions which were to be used in the new print. Seeing as this was a fine art project, the drawings which were too illustrationy or verging on cute were left out, and the more personal ones were kept. In the end I had too much material and the book was about 100 pages long. There is no text except for a small introduction/ presentation at the beginning and some info at the back. 

The colour red ties the book together, as there are whole spreads with red background throughout the book and the page number and text is also red. 

When it came to arranging the illustrations in InDesign, I was advised to keep a few compositional rules throughout the book – this is vital for cohesiveness and to avoid confusing the viewer. There are 5 rules and more exceptions, even though in hindsight I could have played around more with this. The reason is that having a 100 page book with repeating composition and no text makes you get a bit visually bored about two thirds in.

So the size is slightly shorter than an A4 standard paper, and it’s perfect for illustrations with lots of detail – I personally don’t see why an illustrator would go to the trouble of drawing details only to have them lost on too small a size book. Especially children books, I think, should be big. But I digress. The paper is slightly grainy and a little on the yellow side of white. 

I chose a navy blue paper for the cover and had to handwrite the title with a white marker. The title, Mă vei găsi într-o carte (You will find me in a book), comes from an illustration from the second object-book. I randomly drew a leaf inside the book and I imagined that’s what the leaves or flowers pressed in books would say. Of course, the meaning can be extended – aren’t the writers, the artists, or the characters the ones we find in the books we open?

After printing, which wasn’t without problems as the print guy left an empty page in the middle of the book and I had to repair it, the two copies of the book were hand bound by a girl who specializes in this (Grapho_mat) and I drew the title on the cover afterwards. She also took these really professional photographs with the blue background.

First page spread with introduction

Info at the end of the book

I got an A in my BA exam, and the book was a finalist in the 2016 edition of The Most Beautiful Books Competition in Romania.

Thanks for reading,

Meruna.