I concluded with six new potential patterns that have been printed out on regular paper to the size of the carving wood. I prepared the shina plywood, a special wood from Japan known for being both high quality but also soft, by staining it with black ink. Once dry, I put yellow carbon transfer paper face down and the printed pattern face up and securely attached it. With red pen, I traced over every line of the printed out pattern to be able to more easily see what I had already traced over (it takes a few hours). Once done, I remove the printed pattern and the carbon paper and used fixative to secure the yellow tracing to the wood. After that, I began to carve.

The labor is intentional, as doing so much by hand is prone to unevenness, errors, and surfacing of material characteristics. This is all important as I liken it to a “de-processing” of the digital mark that came from designing the patterns on a computer. Like many of the Buhr book’s decorative papers and covers, you can often see that repetition of shapes is not perfect because the hand that crafted it is not machine, and there is something about that that speaks of time and humanity that seems fitting for thoughts frozen in printed form (that there are now AI authored books is another topic altogether, but I feel I can confidently say that the books these designs are taken from were created by actual people).

The next steps are to finish carving, while simultaneously building the cases/shapes of the Book-Objects with bookboard, bookcloth, and textblock. Whenever my hands get too sore from one repetitive task, I switch over to the next.

The rest is TBC… expect this page to change over time.

The Process

For Muted Volumes, some of the decorative pattern aspects of the final Book-Objects is an amalgamation of many of the motifs of bookcovers and endpapers I’ve encountered over my time at Buhr. I have documented many of these patterns and traced over them as a method of studying the design and pattern making in general.

I extracted segments of the patterns through the hand tracing and digitized them (at first reluctantly, but it saved a ton of time) to create new repeat patterns using bits and pieces of many book covers and endpapers. Using what looks like a flash sheet of these motifs, I designed new repeat patterns which will be hand carved on wood and printed to be a part of the final form of the Book-Objects.