Inks and Cookbooks

I've been busy lately. I wanted to give inking a shot so hubby said I needed to start off with brush inking, ha. He gave me a few books to read on inking and some videos to watch. I watched the videos and read over the books. Last time I was at the art store I bought a $18 white sable #2 brush. (It was cheaper than the Windsor Newton Series 7 because I can't see spending $40 on a brush just to goof off with.) I have to say that it holds it's shape well as long as it's loaded with ink and I don't try to use it when it's to dry.

I never do things the easy way so I started out with a picture off of Deviant Art"Fallen" by Rantz I fully inked this with a brush. After working on another picture and going back I see some things that I would do different, or at least I think I could make it look a little better. Anyway here it is - Left is original pencil and right is my inks:

I came across this site seanellery.com and he has a bunch of pencils on there for people to ink so I grabbed "Arwyn" - by Marcio Abreu This one came out better. I inked all with the brush except for the hair and some of the leaves which were inked with a Micron pen. Same - Original pencil on the left and my inks on the right:

Anyway I'll do more inking and practice when I get time. In the meantime I have a cookbook I'm working on basically publishing for someone. I helped design the cover and back. I'm printing it and physically hand making / binding each book. :D I'm excited to be doing this. It's going to be a spiral bound book instead of a hard sewn bound book. This way someone can fold it over, lay it flat or have it sit nicely on a book holder without having to worry about it closing on them or creasing the spine.

Right now I have everything needed for the books ordered. I cut the book board for the covers and the sheets of paper for the interior of the covers. Here's the stack of board for 25 books:

I still have work to do on page layouts and getting all the recipes to fit right onto the pages and making sure all the formatting is the same. I think that is what is actually going to take the longest. I'll post more pictures of the progress of the books as I can. :)