I met my husband, Dario, in November of 2004 and have been making drawings of him ever since. Some are quick and not very good. Some are more resolved portraits that sort of look like him. Some don't really look like him at all.
We celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary this past July and I wanted to make him a gift to mark the occasion. I've been very interested in book making for the past decade, but haven't taken the time to make many books. I wanted to change that this year. I decided to make a book of all the drawings I had done of Dario during the time we'd know each other.
I went through all of my old sketch books and travel journals and decided that I'd include absolutely every drawing of him in this book. Even the really bad drawings. If I was looking at Dario, or a photo of Dario, while drawing then it was going into the book.
I made a quick little maquette to figure out the order of everything and then put my scans into a layout. I wanted the pages to be good quality so I got it printed at a local print shop. The interior pages are just regular matte paper and cover is on card stock. Then I found this very simple pamphlet stitch for binding it all together.
I put a lot of time into this project and I was pretty happy with the end result. And Dario seemed to really like it when I gave it to him at our anniversary dinner.
Here's a look at some of my favourite spreads:
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