[Arts and Crafts] My New Vegas-planner!

After starting this project last year (new years-humor, harr harr harr) I finally finished it at 1.30 AM today. I always bought school-planners to use throughout the year but after the first month I just couldn’t be bothered. I never found a design I really liked so they didn’t feel very ‘personal’.

But one evening I was surfing the internet and came across a bookbinding tutorial by lenoki (Part 1 and part 2). She explained very easily how to make your own book, and I thought it looked like a lot of fun so I decided that I wanted to give it a try.

I wanted the book to have a real journal inside instead of making pages with lines and dates from scratch. If I did that with normal A4-paper then the book would be too thick to fit in my backpack… So I went to Staples and bought the cheapest hardcover planner they had. Then I went to the textile store to buy fake leather and silk ribbons. I picked up some contact glue at the hardware store and at the bookstore I got a huge plate of boxboard. It was very windy that day, and walking through downtown with a large piece of boxboard proved to be pretty hard. It acted like a sail. It is incredible that I was not blown into traffic.

My dull wallpaper knife eventually managed to free the planner from its hideous gold and beige cover. After some measuring I started to plan the design of the cover. I had a Fallout: New Vegas-design in mind. The front would be the mobile-wallpaper of Vault Boy (link). I had to work with it a little in Photoshop in order to remove the logo and expand the edges a little.

I finally learned how to work with the clone stamp…

The front cover was done fast. The back was a little more tricky. I wanted to have the cards and poker chips from the Collector’s Edition combined to make it look like they were lying on a table. It took three hours of working with an old scanner to get all the chips (both sides) and cards (seven casinos plus some pictures) turned into .jpeg images. Then it was another two hours or so in Photoshop to put it all together.

It is VERY important that you save often when you use Photoshop. Especially if you are working on big stuff with tons of layers. You can also save the file as ‘[name] 01′, ‘[name] 02′, ‘[name] 03′ etc.

When I was happy with the design for both sides it was on to printing. I used semi-glossy photo-paper since it was nice and thick. It took a lot of test printing before the colors came out good enough. The vault-suit got more navy blue colors after printing instead of the teal-ish color in the digital file, and the back had somewhat flat colors but I couldn’t do anything about it.

I didn’t take any pictures during all the cutting and printing and gluing and doing things over again because I screwed up. I ran out of contact glue after fixing the fake leather spine, so when it came to the part where I put on the endsheets I had to use some wallpaper glue that I found in the basement. I left it to dry overnight and this is what I woke up to:

This is the front cover.

This is the front endsheet.

This is the back endsheet.

This is the back cover.

And this is a close-up on the end of the spine and the two bookmarks (in vault jumpsuit colors!).

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~ by velanoon on 02/01/2011.