Designing with Florals

I’ve been listening to a lot of Queen this summer, and some lyrics inspired today’s image. I drew some lettering in Photoshop and started a digital collage using my recent botanical gouache illustrations. The image isn’t finished, but I think that when it is, I’m going to use it for an upcoming project. I’m not sure exactly what yet.

Last week, I put the finishing touches on the four botanical floral illustrations that I’ve been working on for a few weeks now. These will grace my next run of sticker prototypes, and soon, journals and notebooks! I’m really excited to get back into the studio to do some book binding.

I got stuck on the cover art the last time that I tried to bind anything reproducible for sale. It was hard to make any sort of cover art durable with a standard home ink-jet printer. I tried all kinds of crazy things to get something workable, including printing on fabric that I pre-treated in a special concoction! That wasn’t actually a disaster, it just wasn’t scalable, and now I know how to print on muslin, I guess.

Now, I have a printer that can print with pigment-based ink, and it makes all the difference. My printer isn’t the fanciest of models, but dang, do I love it. Once I have some text blocks sewn (these are the bundles of folded, sewn-together paper that comprise the “filling” of a book between covers), I will be able to just print my art directly onto some nice cover weight paper.