Project for THR Volume 1

Okay, okay, so brushing past the fact that Bindlegrim made the mistake of waking up in the real world  (with things like stale coffee, office banter, and dangerous commutes) seems it all just put hin back to sleep, dreaming about the garden at Ichabod's Cottage to see if there's a pumpkin vine or two still crawling along the ground. And so this little project came to be...

First of all, for sure, Bindlegrim loves vintage Halloween! With so many direct influences from vintage objects on Bindlegrim's artwork for lanterns, postcards,  etc., there was destined to be some kind of project that involved that olde stuff more directly. Looks like this is it. An archive library, The Halloween Retrospect, houses a whole bunch of vintage information objects (including content from nearly 500 vintage catalogs) and decided to put together a small digest of research from those sources. Of course, that's going to need some work on the book (particularly the cover), and then there's the website, creating a logo, and on and on. But, well, it's all ready now, and here to share. 

So, Bindlegrim had fun at first revisiting some old ghouls from an early lantern, and found this witch face from the very first lantern prototype in 2011.

4 sides of Bindlegrim prototype lantern from 2011

Once in a layout, she took over and let the scene coalesce around her..., and here is the cover for the book which should be available around end of July and/or beginning of August. (It's ready but has a layout bug that needs fixing). 

Cover art for The Halloween Retrospect, Volume 1 by Bindlegrim

That offered a chance to do something more with the art, to offer the books a little extra something to go with them. From out of the cover art, four bookmark-tallies were created to accompany the mailer. Here they are below:

Set of 4 bookmark-tallies, an extra with official copies of the book.

The book also comes with an 11"x17" fold out poster featuring a 1926 Halloween ad of products for schools (very fun stuff), and has some nice color and black and white illustrations across 32 pages. It's a 9"x6" publication, much like those old novelty catalogs, and is sure to have some good info for those into vintage Halloween collectibles. Here are some sneak peek images:

The Halloween Retrospect Vol 1, with poster and 4 tally cards.

The Halloween Retrospect Vol 1, with poster and 4 tally cards.

Oh, and last but not least, Bindlegrim put together a little website for the project: https://halloweenretrospect.com, and the logo below is a link there. Hope you enjoy the return of Bindlegrim, and the book...! 

The Pumpkin Dream - New Borders and Dingbats

After spending some time with "The Pumpkin Dream" (Industry Version) that I had devised for CreateSpace (via Amazon), I started to feel it was missing something. While the book felt fine in its original 7"x7" format for Blurb, the new 7"x10" page felt a little too open to me... and it wasn't long before I was pulling out InkScape (during this past week) and testing some spooky border flourishes for the pages. One such result (below) is this new internal page border, of which a slightly updated version, will soon makes its appearance in the final CreateSpace/Amazon version:

I thought this was great fun to create! And from this border started to go a little crazy putting dingbats in a variety of place - now on the credits, dedication, and biography pages...

From there it was time to attack the cover which was actually the first thing that started to bother me, after I had initially termed the book complete. I felt the cover was not only too plain, but the cover illustration (which at full size has alot of detail) instead looked like a swirl of mush in a reduced size in both real life and as a thumbnail on a web screen. Taking a cue from the border work and dingbats of previous pages, the result came out in this manner:

I have just uploaded these changes to CreateSpace and am awaiting the 48 hour file preview whereby the system makes sure they are printable files. I believe they have just rolled out a new system that lets you publish a book thru now, without having to wait for the proof to arrive at your door, (although I have to say they were always VERY speedy about getting proofs sent). When the files are approved, I plan to go ahead and have that process for sale on the Amazon website. (I'm not sure how long it will take images to update on the Amazon website, so I will submit some images to the book's gallery to make sure the new version is visible with all these new borders and dingbats.