Deborah’s Bee Book.

It’s Christmas Eve and I know now that my bees have safely reached their destination and my client is happy. As a small gift for her I had decided to “just” make a little hand made book, containing prints of all the bees and a little info about them all.  I, like any other artist and designer should know better. “Just” as a creative concept does not exist.  So being pushed for time, dealing with an uncooperative computer and printer and rising panic, it was a bit of a rush. 

Book making, near death by a thousand cuts.

One of the trickiest things is working out the pagination to make sure everything prints properly on double sided paper. I printed the pictures separately which was nice as I cut them out and “tipped” them in, like the old fashioned picture books that always had the colour plates separately printed. I seemed to cut and trim a million bits of paper and the odd fingernail… and then another million for the mistakes I made..sigh…more haste etc…yes, I know.  

I found some paper with little gold cicadas to cover the boards,  as close as I could get to bees in the time, and some honeycomb paper for the inside. Each page had to be creased 3 times to fold properly and finally, Japanese stab binding is easy, if you punch the holes big enough which I failed to do first time round.

I made a quick “spare” everyday book because the blue book is fragile and, of course, the second one was a breeze!! Labels too for the back of the pictures.

Just before final packing I took a snap of the book, with the original painting of the Blue Banded Bee, the labels for the back of the pictures, brushes and paint tubes etc to give things a bit of scale.  The little book is 4 x 5.25 inches with 36 pages.

At the end of this 4 month project I am definitely feeling bee-reft (sorry) without my little winged companions, but there will be more soon and I could always make another book… maybe.

By the way, “Deborah” in Hebrew means “bee”… :)