After a bit of hiatus, new experiments in gilding:
Holding me up is a way to apply golden lines and letters to boks, so I decided to experiment with two books at work. I have two similarly sized biology books that could be given a better looking spine.
Having looked a a few crafts videos on you-tube, I decided to try the laser printer/gold foil/laminator approach. First, I ordered a cheap gold foil of Aliexpress. Then I did a slight rewording of titles of the two books to a more Victorian style, and made a A4 size sheet with the two backs in photoshop:
These two are made to look similar to look like they belong to a series of books.
Next up was making a jacket for the books to hold the spines:
The jacket is made from fairly solid fibre paper I found in the trash heap in the plotter room. Good stuff, I might experiment a bit more with it later.
Then I found some paper with some structure to it. The colour was less than ideal and I did some experiments with using acrylics to paint structure papers, but the gold foil stuck to the acrylics. Spirits based colour don't form a sticky surface though, so I used a big permanent marker:
Print the book spine design on the black side of the paper with a laser printer (important, ink printers won't work):
Then I taped small bits of gold foil over all the printed portions. I could just have laminated using a full sheet, but that would be a bit wasteful (if much faster). The foil has two sides, one silver and one gold. The silver one's will stick to glue, the gold one won't, so golden side up::
I then folded a piece of A3 around the sheet and ran it through the laminator on normal settings. Removing the foul, the faux gold had stuck to the laser printed lines.
The finish was simply to cut out the two spine strips and glue then to the jacket like a quarter binding (quarter cloth binding was not at all unheard of in Victorian times). Here's the result:
The verdict:
They don't look bad, but the colour of the gold is a bit off. It looks a bit to plastic (which I suppose it is). It's actually too shiny relative to the more matte and deeper tone of the gold on some of the real gilt book spines I have. I think the flat surface of the paper makes the shininess stand out a bit more than necessary. I think I'll experiment with using thin rayon or cotton fabric backed by paper to print on. Perhaps the faux gilding will look better with some structure to it.
The other option is to buy a more expensive gold foil. Does anyone else have any experience gilding with printers and laminators?