#bionic battle granny by ozhawk

[zhalfirin-binds]

Leather inset/inlay on my clamshell box for Bionic Battle Granny

This was another design I hade in mind for that bind so I used it on the clamshell. (Process and problems I ran into below the break)

I have no clear instruction on how to do a leather inlay or mosaic so I pretty much went with what felt like the thing to do. For this I pared both, the covering leather and the inset to the same thickness. I dressed the case of the clamshell and let it dry completely. With that step on the way I had time to prepare my inlay. I printed the design I had in mind. When I was still considering to print this I set the silhouette with the first note of the author instead of the title. Given that I have neither a font small enough nor the necessary amount of letters all at once and I really did not feel like setting world for word and, if necessary, letting the letters cool to keep working I switched to the title instead.

Now the difficult part was, that I wanted tos tick to the colour scheme and have a multicoloured print. To get that look I cut out a narrow line inside the print. Just enough to see where the colours needed to go, arranged all my differently coloured foils with a lot of tape and went on tooling more or less blindly and cut out the silhouette being very careful to have the colours still where I wanted them to go.

That done I realised... I forgot to upscale the size from the actual book to the cover of the clamshell and now Peggy looked very forlorn on that too large cover.

Given that the title was not as crisp as I would have wanted it to be, I tried for another two times to get it better. (I did not, each new attempt was actually worse XD) But a fellow binder on the @renegadepublishing discord server, suggested a speech bubble to fill up the empty space which turned out to be a great idea. So I went with that and added the authors name there.

To bring the cut on the cover I traced it carefully with the pointed side of my leather bonefolder (which is just a regular, but tiny bonefolder) and cut the the leather inside out with a scalpel before pasting in the silhouette.

I had to re-adjust a bit and cut away some more of the dark leather as well as I ended up with small gaps, but I'm pretty pleased how it turned out (considering I had no idea how to do this 'properly'). Fortunately for me, the white leather does not reveal the gaps too much, but if I had to do it again and the inlay had a different colour I'd probably colour the cut out (after peeling of the leather there) in either the colour of the base leather or the inlay leather to avoid white flashing in the gaps.

Below is one of the fucked up larger versions (left) and the one I ended up doing (right). Here they are not cut out or pasted in, but just put on top of the case to check the look (the finished version has a somehow weirdly angled leg, but it's done now. Nothing to do about that)

and here a detailed shot of the gaps and the leg

[zhalfirin]

Bionic Battle Granny - ozhawk

These books were part of the Renegady Publishing Tiny Books Bang 2023 event

The typeset was provided by @claudeng80 The story was written by @ozhawkauthor, check out their work!

Full leather binding with leather onlays in clamshell box. case materials binders board 1,5 (case) different leathers, goatskin, (covering material) heat reactive foil, blue (hot stamped title) blind tooled author name

inner book Munken polar 100gsm (book body) @renato-crepaldi marbled paper (endpapers) wibalin (second fly leaf, tipped on the first) button hole silk (endbands)

clamshell box binders board 1 and 1,5 (boxes and case) uncoated blue book cloth (covering material case) @renato-crepaldi marbled paper (covering material boxes) heat reactive foil, cream (hot stamped title)

[leeef]

She may not have super powers but Peggy Carter the Bionic Battle Granny by @ozhawkauthor is pretty amazing too.

Superheroes designed by neural network

I trained the neural network to generate superhero names, based on the list from this site.  I thought the database was going to be way too small, but the network proved me wrong.

Speet Stank Red Fart Mister Man Rad Food Sapgirl Woop Ann Man Boomss Boark II Supperman Superbore Slonk Lid Man Green Hooter II Starm Surper Shartar Goons Nana Rider Farm Captain In Redink Wolver Man Wizler

[zhalfirin-binds]

Detail shots of technical differences on Bionic Battle Granny the book and the clamshell box.

First up the inlay on the clamshell vs the onlay on the book.

The inset leather is (almost) even and level with the covering leather.

The onlay, though buffed and slightly rounded a bit along the edges, still adds visibly on the covering material. (Which is not a flaw! it's just the way onlays work.) The onlays were also part of why I decided to make the clamshell, the edges of the onlay could take damage when shoven between other books and in any case they'd be more susceptible to wear. Another reason was light and dust protection.

(I have no idea how to translate this, perhaps indrawn corners vs. cut corners would work best. Anyhow... )

Another part that differs are the corners. On the book I cut material off, pared the rest thinly and folded a tiny ledge over to cover the corner thoroughly (see the first two pictures). On the clamshell I cut some of the material off as well, but not closer to the corner. The remaining material of the turn-ins got pulled over the corner so there's only intact leather there. The downside of this is, there is too much material and it will set in folds even if spread as evenly as possible over the board. Those folds can be hammered down though and having the turn-ins pared thin helps too.

[zhalfirin]

Clamshell box for my second bind of Bionic Battle Granny by Ozhawk

Materials used

greyboard 1,5 and 1mm (base construction) goat skin leather (covering material and decoration) marbled paper by renato crepaldi (box sidewalls elephant hide paper (box bottoms and inside spine) coloured foil (hot stamped text)