Once Upon A Time In Lari

Upon my recent travels to Tuscany, Italy, I visited a small town called Lari. Lari is known for its circle center that circles round a medieval castle. You can make your way to the top and venture inside to look around. It's in quite impressive condition and being a fan of the medieval period I enjoyed the visit. Inside the tourist shop were these two books that I straight away wanted to buy because of the colours and illustrations. The artist is Tommaso Levente Tani.

 They are fun interactive picture books that appeal to multiple ages. The reason I wanted these so much is because it's an aim of mine to produce a picture book similar to these that have historical information. The set of two consists of one history book explaining the history of Lari and how the castle and town grew over the years. The other book is a fold out activity booklet which has small puzzles and games to do.

 I also got drawn to these books because of the focus on Heraldry they both have, even down to designing and meanings. I previously did a project on Heraldry and find the topic extremely interesting.

 The pages are beautiful and colourful, the translation from Italy is a little bit poor and some of the sentences don't quite make sense but it's still a lovely book to add to my collection. The illustrations are vector based with quite a simplistic style, the characters have a "copy and paste" feel but it works really well. I think these are lovely little books with lots of information displayed in a very attractive way!

Coat of Arms Tunnel book - Bookworks

After finding a new love with tunnel books I created a few mock ups and then a final version. I wanted the Coat of Arms to go back in layers with each layer broken down into each component of the arms. I painted by own Coat of Arms for my surname and made a book to resemble the materials medieval books were made from.

...

Leather bound book - Bookworks

My new project is based around making and the history of books. My brief is to pick a book written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and then take inspiration from it and move in a certain direction. I chose the book "Sir Nigel" which is the story of Knight from the Medieval period. This lead me to research what books looked like that were made from the Medieval time period. I then created my own book based upon my research, so this is my second attempt at a leather covered book. It still needs work but I'm quite happy with the final look, especially the leather bound strap!