Portfolio Album for Jewelry Artist
This portfolio album was created for Native American jewelry artist Michael Roanhorse. Michael does incredible, museum-quality work and this album was intended to be filled with photos of his past creations to travel with him to museum shows where he sells his art. Michael's work is very contemporary and he has a great design sense.
Michael designed the cover layout based on themes and images used in the designs of his jewelry. The album has 50 pages of acid-free black heavyweight paper (the book is roughly 2" thick). The page size is 12" tall by 10" wide. The clean design on the front does not hint at how difficult it was to create this cover. Three metal dies needed to be ordered; one for the "Roanhorse", one for the wavy lines, and one for the small circle...everything on the cover that appears in white stamping pigment required a die. But even before the dies could be ordered, I paid a professional graphic designer to "clean up" the images since only low-resolution files were available. I was glad to do that for Michael, but in the future, I will have to insist on high-resolution files of images that will be made into dies or I won't be able to accept them. The red rectangles are individual pieces of thin board covered with red British bookcalf and set into recesses on the cover to create a flat, smooth look. The "Roanhorse" name on the front definitely pushed the limits of the size of die that the heating and stamping machinery can handle. I do not think I'd attempt a die this large (long) again. The red line under the name was added in a separate hot foil stamping process using a long piece of brass rule.
The custom clamshell box was created to fit the book exactly. The "Roanhorse" name was again stamped on the spine in white stamping pigment.
In spite of all the challenges, I am happy with the final result.
Click on the link below to see some of Michael's work on his own site.
The cost of a project like this would be around $900 NOT including the cost of the dies that were used to stamp on the cover (the two large ones could cost as much as $140 EACH for just the dies.
