Materials: Blank notebook, sculpting epoxy, coffee filters, acrylic paint, glow paint, clear liquid epoxy, India ink.
This is the fourth notebook with a fancy cover that I made. I incorporated various lessons from the earlier notebooks, and some mask projects, that helped to make this go smoothly. I also tried a few new ideas.
I thought it could look cool to make large sections of scales, that were themselves composed of many smaller scales. I had already made the Stone Scale Notebook that’s supposed to look like lava in the daytime, so I thought it would be neat to make a notebook that glowed like lava at night.
As usual, I started by protecting the blank paper with a plastic bag. Because this particular notebook had a cloth cover to begin with, I didn’t put a substrate on the outside, but only put some coffee filters on the side.
For the scales, I still had some old epoxy left over from the Glowing Eyes Notebook, so I began with that. I rolled it into snakes and then cut the snakes up into a bunch of segments, rolled these into balls, and pressed them onto the spine and covers. About halfway through I ran out of epoxy, and couldn’t find the same type for sale I had been using, so I decided to try out Milliput. I’d heard about this brand from watching crafting videos. It was slightly more crumbly than what I’d been using, but overall, very similar.
The epoxy stuck to the cover all right, but to make sure these scales wouldn’t fall of, I sealed them with about two bottles of superglue.
The process of putting down the scales went smoothly. It was just a lot of repetitive work.
For painting, I sprayed this with two coats of grey primer. A few years ago I made a mask—not listed on this site—that was supposed to look like jade or green tourmaline. I wanted that same appearance here. I applied many thin layers of green and blue, with flecks of black, white, bronze and gold paint, to get this look.
When I had finished the acrylic painting, I brushed on two thick layers of orange glow paint between the scale sections. In the daylight it appears whitish. If it didn’t glow, I would not have painted this color between the scales, but I actually like how it turned out.
I’ve found that paint doesn’t stick well to epoxy, even when it’s primed, so I sealed this with two layers of clear liquid epoxy.
Finally, I took the protective bag off the paper, and it was time to color the edges. The red India Ink, which I had not used for the Glowing Eyes Notebook, seemed like it would work well in contrast with the green scales. I applied it with cotton makeup pads, which made application neat and clean this time.
I’m very happy with how this notebook turned out.