It’s been a while since we made a book sculpture. We turned a couple of books into fairy tales a while back, but we haven’t been making anything of the sort for too long.
Well, we happened to have an idea sometimes, a spark of inspiration. All those ideas slowly faded away before we could start planning something, eventually. No one of them was so strong to catch our crafting interest.
One day, though, things changed, and the idea we were waiting for finally came knocking to our door.
Click for the finished project detailed photos
One day I found on Pinterest an illustration of a woman reading inside a book. A stick kept the pages slightly open, while the girl prone on her belly was illuminating with a torch a book in her hands.
Unfortunately, lost in the sea of the internet, I wasn’t able to retrace the original author. Too good not to share, I suppose. I wish I could find the real author to thank him and give him proper credit, one day.
I came to my husband sayng “why don’t we try and make a book sculpture out of this?”. We were both struck by this picture. Needless to say, he agreed, and together we started planning a new book diorama.
We lingered on the diorama idea for a while, since we happened to find, one day, the perfect character to place inside our book. It was not an avid reader, but a fairy. Elegant, in the best pose and of the right size to fit in the kind of book we had in mind.
All our previous book sculptures had fairies as protagonists, so we wanted to continue the tradition. This meant deviating from the original inspirational image, but a mere reproduction wasn’t our first intention in the first place. What we liked was the athmosphere.
The first step, then, was selecting the right book and giving it an antique appearance. Actually, books. Since with our fairy we took home two smaller ones, my husband proposed to make three similar dioramas. Since we are working on one, why not three?
We found old discarded hardcover books the right size for our fairies. First, we decided the two pages that had to host the fairy. My husband removed a few pages so the final composition didn’t result too bulky and the diorama elements had more space.
Then he made a mixture of tea, water and vinyl glue to give the pages a more ancient allure. I was skeptical at the beginning, since our books came out of damp basements and the pages already had a yellowish glow. In the end the result was great, though.
The glue in the mixture was useful to make the pages stay in place: he calculated where he wanted the book open and how, clamped with clothespins to be delicate and also gently baked the books, to make the mixture dry as thoroughly and evenly as possible.
Then came one of the favourite parts for Locutus: sculpting and painting. We decided to add a tree as main feature alongside the fairy, with branches entering the top page and leaves coming out of them. He also wanted to make a little tree stump.
The main tree for the bigger fairy had to remind the Weirwood tree from “Game of Thrones”, with red leaves and white trunk. For the other two fairies we decided to try a more natural look, with brown trunk and green leaves.
Locutus sculpted those elements out of modeling clay and painted them all with acrylic colors. The leaves, as well as other green elements, came from our favourite modeling shop: we still had a few model landscaping features from the latest additions to our mountain diorama and added just a few other elements.
Then time came for the final touches. We added leaves, grass, flowers, moss and, most important, tiny little mushrooms.
Those were special mushrooms we got by mistake one day from Amazon and were awaiting their chance to feature in a project. When they came they were smaller than we expected, but they came out perfect for those fairy book dioramas.
What’s even more special is the little addition we made: we painted them with glow-in-the-dark paint. At night, when the house is dark, they glow and add a magical appeal to the diorama. Seeing how they turned out, we decided to paint with the same varnish other details: the flowers around the fairy, her circlet and her wings.
To complete, we also added little metal corners to the book covers. Just to give the impression of old fairy tale tomes.
Finally, our three book dioramas were complete. A funny project to make from start to finish.
But we still have a couple of fairies in the house that are waiting for their perfect craft. Curious to see them? Stick around and come back from time to time.
