Figured i'd drop a line.

As expected, i've been busy as hell.. lol. Good news is i've got a 2 week break coming up, bad news is everything is due in this week; which means stressss boy stressss.

One of the papers i'm doing is bookmaking, which is pretty cool.. aside from the fact that it has completely taken up all of my time. Even my other subjects have been neglected due to the amount of work involved for this thing. Anyone who has been keeping up with my activities in Hiyaku Studio should know that making books isn't anything new to me, but i never had much understanding of the technical side of things until now.. In a nutshell, it's a lot of crap to take in lol. Good crap, though, mind you.

One thing which blew me away was the printing costs.. For my past projects with Hiyaku Studio, each of our books cost (a maximum of) $14 to produce.. this one stand-alone book i'm working on now cost $115. That's just for the pages, nevermind the cover and binding. lol.. ugh... Even if it all came out perfectly, it still wouldn't have been worth what i paid for it imo... which it didn't hahaha. Well, it is my first time getting into all the technical stuff, so i can't expect it to all go smoothly. The biggest kick to the nuts was the trimming, though.. i don't even wanna get into that.

Regarding the good points.. the print quality is pretty awesome. It's printed on 170gsm double sided matte paper (hence why it was so expensive); so at least the artworks look good. For once, the colour is bang on the mark. I used Hiyaku Studio artworks for my book, btw.

At first, i didn't wanna do this again for the next term since it's so buttload expensive... but, having fucked up here and there, now i'm amped to get this shit right. I really shouldn't be spending this much money if it could be avoided, but, god dammit, this needs to be done. I refuse to let $100+ go to waste.

That being said, i might be open for commissions for a brief period when the break comes around (starts this coming weekend), just to help me pay for this thing a little bit. I can't accept any jobs that are too time consuming, however.. the break ain't that long.

..... hm... looking back on what i just said, which was basically 'I need work during my break to pay for work after the break', lmao.. how i keep doing this to myself, i dunno.

Anyhow, i may post photos of this book when I've completed it. I've still gotta work on the cover and slip-cover yet.