Making Sketchbook covers

I start my sketchbooks with some kind of cool paper treatment.  Sometimes its an op art piece.  Sometimes its marble paper.  Sometimes its bubble paper.  Either way, the student generates some kind of cool design.  Alternatively, the easy way is to pick a class color from butcher paper and use that, decorating afterward.  this needs to be larger than the cover structure by at least several inches each way.  Next, I pre-cut the covers to size.  I start with 28 x 44 8 ply poster board, so for 8 1/2 x 11 paper, it makes the most sense for me to cut them to 11 x 9 to eliminate waste.  Each student gets 2 blanks and we laminate the materials together with thinned down elmers glue.

For an individual cover students need the decorative outside paper, a board, and an end sheet.  the end sheet could be a plain or colored sheet of office paper, or sometimes I use the class sylabus so it is integrated into the structure of the book.

with the table covered, the decorative sheet is laid down, and a 1-2 inch house brush is used to completely cover the sheet with a thin, wet layer of glue.  the tops and bottoms are folded up, and then the corners are folded into corners (I call this the present fold, because you use a similar technique to wrap a Christmas present).  Once the decorative paper is completely wrapped around the board, the end sheet also has a layer of glue, then that is adhered to the inside of the cover, to protect and seal the decorative paper from future damage.

This is set to dry for the next stage, which is book binding.  this will be covered in the next post here.