My starting ideas for the book were really vague and I only really had the idea that I wanted to use the colour green. For some reason I really liked the colour green on that day.
It took a long time to come up with any ideas for the book and then eventually I had the idea to create a book about leaves. I thought about the pages of a book being a bit like leaves and stuff and decided I could just sort of categorise a load of leaves and make them into a book.
I thought a bit about the format that the pages could take and how the leaves would be laid out before just getting on with it and creating the leaves. I decided to use illustrator to vectorise loads of leaves so that I could scale them up and down however I wanted when it came to categorising and arranging.
As you can see this took a long time because each leaf has a lot of detail so needs a lot of vector points.
In total I vectorised 55 leaves.
And then categorised them by shape.
Next I started working with the layout of the pages which I found really hard to get into. I'm not that confident in working with layout but tried to use basic principles of lining things up and leaving some bits of space on each page as well as making sure all borders on each page were equal.
Once I had done all the pages I started trying to work with the colours. I wanted to use green and cover pretty much the entire gamut, sortof fading from yellower greens to blue greens as the book goes on.
I also originally wanted to incorporate a bit of type to explain what each leaf actually is.
I lost the type once I remembered that I wanted to print onto recycled stock. The idea behind this was that the book is about leaves and stuff so I could use recycled stock, but rather than actually going to the effort of recycling or creating my own paper I could just print over something that has previously been printed.
After a crit I decided that the best stock to use would be a newspaper of some kind, and the financial times has a pinkish paper which could compliment the greens quite well. Obviously there is a lot of type over the newspaper pages so any type that I put on the pages would not be seen.
Once I had done all of the pages they looked like this.
Obviously this is just how I wanted the pages to actually look so I also had to paginate them to be in the right order for the book. Next I started working on the front and back cover of the book.
I wanted to keep the book simple, so I just wanted a paper cover similar to the pages of the book though maybe a bit thicker. For the cover I had the idea to use the silhouettes and also reverse out the line so that there is a mix of line drawing and silhouettes of the leaves featured in the book.
Once I had done this I just needed to decide on colours.
I asked a couple of peoples opinions on the best colour and the general consensus was that the second lot of colours are the best. They look a bit bright on the screen and I'd like them to be a bit paler but other than that I agree and I think they fit best with the book.
So once everything was paginated and I was happy with the pages I went to try and print.
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to print on the financial times paper because I thought the pinkish colour could compliment the greens throughout the book.
I cut each sheet to A4 at a skewed angle rather than straight across just to make it look more interesting and make sure people realise the paper isnt there to be read.
The problem came when I actually started printing.
It turns out that the paper is far too thin and the printer can't grab it properly and the paper ends up creasing and folding and getting stuck in the printer . This was really annoying and I can't really think of a way around it.
What's even more annoying is that it would have actually looked really cool as in the example below where it very nearly took the paper but ended up getting stuck and creased again anyway.
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