Monday, June 27, 2016

Batman Mug Book


For nearly two some years... I do believe; I've kept this novelty box which once held a Batman mug. It was a Christmas gift for my brother; a practical joke, where we felt he needed a mug to go along with his Batman T shirt. I swiped the box when no one was looking, figured it was going to be discarded anyway, but I had an idea; and I went to sketch it. A few years later, and running a little late, I finally made the box into a novelty book as a birthday gift.

 Above is the basic sketch page I did in my idea book. At first I thought about painting a speech bubble over the words "Batman 20 oz. sculpted mug", and then write in the speech bubble, "I'm Batman!"; but I decided against it, and saved that running joke for a trading card instead.  I also sketched out the accordion pocket idea; that inspiration credit goes to my sister. I had to actually designs the pocket from scratch...didn't have a template, so I had to make one. In case you want to know; the pocket is made of textured yellow scrapbook paper, smooth cream colored scrapbook paper for the pockets, an off gold brad, and some black elastic thread.

Something else you may notice is that I drew the book with spiral wires. Originally I was going to use my bind it all, but found that I couldn't use that method without destroying some of the cover; so I took the hand bound approach and made signatures instead, using the ribbon and cloth method. I made a base cover, then glued the boards to it, covered the spine with gold duck tape, and even ran black fabric paint along the edges of the box covers to hide that somewhat unsightly corrugated edge. 

Back on the subject of trading cards; just below is the collage sheet I assembled on Photoshop. I included the batman symbol for the front inner cover...and it came out too large; thankfully I had a smaller one already printed. As for the cards, I fit the images onto a 2.5 in. by 3.5 in. format in the program, and did a little tweaking. Two of the images were clipets from the comic book, and the other four trading cards were made with selected images from a movie comic poster for the 1989 Tim Burton directed Batman film; this is why there's a Joker card. I simply took the pictures, applied them to the small canvas, and put in my own text for that extra bit of interest. The last step was fairly simple; I printed them out on Photo paper at the highest quality, cut the cards out, glued them to black scrapbook paper backings, and laminated their fronts. They actually came out better than I expected.
 Trading cards and front symbol

And now for some fun, here's a video I did to show you the book fully finished.
Enjoy. ^_~

Full cover






 Front cover
Back cover

 Inner front cover and pages
Back inner cover with card pocket



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