White Leather Feather Illustration
Wedding Guest Book
Let me tell you about white book leather...many customers request white leather, but most are discouraged from using it by the price. I do not know why, but white book leather is very expensive and sometimes difficult to find. In addition, the foil that I usually use to stamp on the covers does not stick to white book leather, so the only type of stamping I can do is blind stamping. Furthermore, white leather is not easily cleaned (and usually cannot be cleaned at all). It picks up every dirty fingerprint, every bit of dust on a table, and is very suceptible to water, oil, and pen marks. Have I scared you off yet? I hope so! Because it is very difficult to work with and keep clean while I work on it. Did I mention it is expensive? The piece of leather used for this one book cost nearly $100 for the leather alone. And even though I usually do not require payment until the order is finished, in the case of white leather, I require payment for the leather up front.
Occasionally I do not succeed in scaring a customer away from using white leather. This is one of those cases. This customer really wanted a white leather guest book in spite of all the warnings and pitfalls. She found a lovely image of a feather on the internet (a rendering by a gifted scientific illustrator named Gina Mikel; you can reach Gina at http://www.scientificillustrator.com ). My customer contacted the artist and paid a $100 fee for the right to use the image of the feather on the cover of her guest book. This fee was for one use of the image only. Gina was very nice and cooperated with me to send a high-resolution image of the feather illustration. I sepia-toned the image to go with the soft look of the rest of the book. The feather was printed on soft-finish archival printer paper (purchased specifically for this project; regular pearl-finish photo paper did not have a soft enough look for this cover) and was permanently attached to the cover in a recessed area (which helps provide SOME protection for the image). The endpapers of this book had a bit of a moire look in a cream pattern reminicient of feathers. The ribbon page marker is cream and gold. Originally, my customer wanted gold lettering on the cover, but that is not possible with white leather, so the lettering and decoration were blind stamped. I do think the result is lovely; very soft and feminine without being overdone at all. But the resulting book also has to be handled with extreme care to ensure that it STAYS lovely and does not end up marked, gray, and dirty. I wish my customer the best of luck in taking care of the book!
A book like this would cost around $375 NOT including the cost paid by the customer to use the feather image.
