Well no more wondering about what I’m going to put on the covers of the flash drive boxes. I’ve found these playing cards on eBay that I’m going use. They excite me, as I sort of fell in love with them. Maybe I’ll even place another playing card in the box. It depends on what I feels like doing. I just got the deck today. Still, all the little details on this book are moving damn slow.

I still have to get my printer fixed. It’s in the shop now – finally. I took a shot down the freeway into Burbank and took it over over to Tek Media Group to have them fix the thing. It took me a while to get up the nerve to bring it in because, truthfully, I have not been able to drive. I still have too much panic and anxiety right now. It’s been raining a lot too. But now it’s there and now I wait.

In the meantime, some of the other supplies came, like stuff from Paper Mojo. I bought three things there: the cardstock for my covers, which are black with linen laid on top of it. It’s not so easy to see in this picture, but you can get an idea of the texture (maybe).

I am seriously considering having the covers letterpressed, or rather, hot stamped in white. Though, that’s an expense I may not be able to pull off. It might make all the difference. It depends on how much my printer is going to cost first. The covers will either be blank, or look a little bit like this:

Either way, it’s pretty simple.

I also got these beautiful imported papers from Italy. These will be the flysheets. I guess you can also call these “end sheets,” or end papers, or even “endleafs.” They are the papers that go between the cover and the first page of the book (if desired), so that your book doesn’t open right onto the first page. Sometimes two are used in the case of hardcover books and one is glued to the inside of the cover to make it more durable. You usually want at least an #80 paper, and you want them to look pretty too. At least I do.

So I picked these. This one has pretty dandelions. You can’t really see in this picture, but the gold parts are super shiny, like gold leaf.

I also got this paper, which is actually letterpressed. (The flowers indent into the paper.) The texture is so nice!

Now, don’t worry. I know these two papers don’t look good together. I’m not going to to use them together. I’m not an idiot. I’m going to make 10 books with the dandelions and 10 books with the lavender letterpress flowers. It’ll be a surprise as to which one you get (if you’re buying one). It will be a surprise to me too – because I’m not going to keep track which one is in which box. And there will be other interesting surprises in the box as well. I’m not going to say what they are, but each box will have something very unique inside.

I also fished out my recycled Fabriano paper from my flat files “paper drawer” that I’ll be using for the loose circle drawing insert. I just snapped a quick pic of the paper so you people had something to look at. It’s not a spectacular picture, so for those of you that are bored, just look away.

Earlier in the week, I had a hard time getting the book’s basic template accomplished because I was trying to do it in MS Word. I know, I know. What a time waster. I know how to use InDesign, but I didn’t have it. I eventually figured out how to log into the Adobe Cloud temporarily (for a few hours) and I quickly make the template in the fraction of the time I spent working on it in Word. I turned the InDesign file into a print-ready PDF and viola! Snap, snap, snap and it’s all ready to go. Just need that printer.

Until then, I suppose I could be cutting the papers I have, but I’d have to do that in the studio, and it’s been freezing out there because of all the rain lately. What I am really looking forward to is getting back to that watercolor that I never finished. Yes, the one I kept talking about finishing and never did. I mean, what the hell happened?

Oh yeah, I remember now. I know what the hell happened. I was writing a book. After that, I kind of built a few websites and continued to write. And today, I had to build a make-shift blueprint for my show in May at the Lancaster Museum. They are already asking for some of the details. This is super rough, but it’s an idea:

Maybe now I’ll be able to dedicate a little time to that damn watercolor.