TECHNIQUE
Unsupported link stitch with a Fraynot hinge attachment. Full fair goatskin painted with leather dyes and foil tooled. Double silk end-bands. Text block edges decorated with a reverse transfer technique and acrylic paint. Leather joints. Flyleaves and edge-to-edge doublures printed with oil based inks using a soft plate offset technique.
DESIGN
I was inspired by the titular tale. I found it to be incredibly eerie and unsettling. The mysteriousness of the story draws you in. How can one convey that into a design for a binding? I wanted the design to have that feeling without being literal.
I turned to artists whose paintings had had a similar effect on me. Artists like Edvard Munch, Howard Hodgkin and Mark Rothko. Their canvases are often saturated with paint. The depth of their colours always draws me in.
I needed to begin with a basic structure. I drew a series of rough pencil sketches of Venetian streets; loose with scratchy lines. The chosen composition was then transferred onto my pared skin, this created the framework for the application of leather dyes. I too saturated my “canvas”, carefully playing with colours and layers to achieve a sense ominosity.
