Help me help a friend cut lots of precise tiny holes

November 21, 2007 5:50 PM

Artbook publishing help needed! Difficulty: crazy cutouts. Help me help an artistic friend save his work from admirers. [very] extended explanation follows.

The internets have let me down so far, so I'm placing my hopes in the arms of askme.

So here's the deal:
A friend of mine creates wonderful multi[multi!]layered books of art, and I'm trying to help him get them published. They are fragile, and are slowly being destroyed by people flipping through the pages to look at them.

The books contain drawings with intricate cutaway portions such that the background of any one image might be a dozen or so pages away from [and look much different than] the 'starting' page. I don't know if I'm being clear here, so I will link to a couple of photos of the book's innards:

picture #1

picture #2

I've tried [and he has tried] asking around at a few publishing houses, and the price quoted to do this seems astronomical.

The real problem seems to lie in the cutting of the pages. Each page would need a unique die, and it must precisely line up with the printed image. Also complicating things [maybe? does it matter?] is that these books are already bound.

I don't know anything about the art world or the publishing world, but I want to help because I think it's a worthy project and the artist is a really swell guy.

Ideally, he just wants a small [circa 100] run of books, but I think that he is flexible about that.

I've tried to talk to the Canada Council for the Arts to see if there are grants available for this kind of thing, but I am having a rough time finding the right person or making myself understood or both. I've written science-y grant applications successfully before, but this world of arts grants is very foreign and confusing to me.

The one option that I see as most economical for this is to just get the images printed and then buy a laser cutter off of ebay and cut the holes with that, but I've never used a laser cutter before, and I might be imagining things to be more simple than they really are.

I guess what I'm looking for is some creative thinking and practical advice.

posted by Acari to media & arts (14 comments total)

You are having a rough time because you aren't clear on what it is you want to do. The work really does seem to fall under "art". As such, it's audience would be different than what springs to mind when you start talking about mass producing it, even in small numbers, as that is a commericial application and not really grant worthy. There is a whole area of arts called book arts and it is for projects like what your friend does and the work shows in galleries. What is his goal? To sell the concept? Get the work out there? Does he want the work mass produced or does he just want to get it shown, period? He is straddling the fence between fine and commercial art. He could probably make a living at it either way because the work is lovely and probably will find a market, but he needs to decide how he is going to package himself as much as his work.
posted by 45moore45 at 5:56 PM on November 21, 2007

try this site for more info: http://www.philobiblon.com/
posted by 45moore45 at 6:07 PM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Try calling the folks at the Center for Book Arts for ideas. Your friend's work looks gorgeous, but it also looks as if it would be an enormous headache to reproduce (and as if the result would differ significantly from the original work). Nevertheless, these guys will have ideas.

The same blood, sweat, and tears poured into making a larger set of one-of-a-kind books might in the end be much more satisfying -- enough to bid for a show in a gallery, for instance.
posted by gum at 6:10 PM on November 21, 2007

The real problem seems to lie in the cutting of the pages. Each page would need a unique die, and it must precisely line up with the printed image.

If he just wants a small run, he should look into laser cutting, maybe with Ponoko or a company near you. Alternately he could buy a Craftrobo cutting machine (like a desktop printer, but it cuts stuff instead of printing) and do it himself, a friend of mine has one to make stencils with and loves it. Either way, your friend would need to get his art into Illustrator or Freehand vector formats.
posted by lia at 6:40 PM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

Prebound could push the price up a lot, too. I'd consider cutting the binding off so the pages can be die-cut, then rebinding afterwards.
posted by rhizome at 6:42 PM on November 21, 2007

Clarification: for the Craftrobo/Ponoko approach, only the cutting lines need to be in Illustrator or Freehand vector formats.

The books are beautiful!
posted by moonmilk at 6:52 PM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

You folks are being very helpful very fast! Thanks!

rhizome: I'd assumed that the binding would likely need to be removed, and barring any miracles I think that will definitely need to happen.

lia: thanks for the links. I imagine that scanning each page with a black sheet behind it would do for creating vector files. Am I off base?

gum: how have I not found these links? srsly. He does have a series of books, and is always working on them. That means, however, that he's always carrying them around and they're always in harm's way. I think he just wants to make sure that his work doesn't vanish into the ether.

45moore45: I'm not clear because those are really hard questions! My impression [and I will clarify this with him as soon as I can] is that he's not looking to strike it rich, but rather to reproduce his work and not go into crazy amounts of debt to do it. Selling some copies to offset costs seems like a reasonable thing to do, but if that gets in the way of it ever getting done, then...


Please keep the ideas coming! My email's in my profile in the event that anyone has super top secret paper gnomes that they'll lend me in exchange for lots of cookies. Or if, you know, someone happens to think of something way far into the future. This sounds like it's going to be a long process!
posted by Acari at 7:02 PM on November 21, 2007

Acari, this sketch to vector tutorial should help you some. As moonmilk (my friend who owns the Craftrobo) pointed out, only the cutting lines need to be in vector format, so if you scan the art in for printing and then create the cutting line vectors using the art as a guide, you should be fine as long as you make sure the print and cut lines match up.
posted by lia at 7:12 PM on November 21, 2007

Convert from bitmap to vector graphics online using VectorMagic.
posted by chudder at 7:21 PM on November 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I worked in a model shop with an industrial laser cutter for several years. The kind of work you're showing is certainly possible, but it's still somewhat labor intensive. You would have to cut unbound sheets, and be very careful to match the registration of the cut with the printed ink. You could go through 5-15 sheets per cut with the laser, but you don't want to overdo the power settings and char the edges too much. Then you have to clean up the paper bits, collate the sheets after they're all cut, and get them bound. The binding process is not something I'm familiar with, but it seems like you could lose the registration of the stack during that step, which would make the whole book a lot less pretty.

I'm guessing an assembly-line process could probably turn out five books every couple of days, once you got all of the artwork prepped.
posted by Chris4d at 7:23 PM on November 21, 2007

What about leasing a laser cutter, if you can't afford to buy one?

"Leasing starts at $175/month (OAC)" for versalasers (in the US):
http://www.ulsinc.com/versalaser/english/laser_systems/laser_systems.html
I'd color-print a few pages and then send them in for sample cutting and decide based on that. (Aside: I've always wanted to buy or build a laser cutter.)

You don't mention where your friend is located, by the way, which makes it tricky to recommend local people and resources, not that I know anything about this.

"Also complicating things [maybe? does it matter?] is that these books are already bound."
I imagine it would, yes. If you can cut the originals, I'd do so, or have a print shop guillotine-cut it in one go, and then flat-bed scan them. Perhaps you might be able to use something like a foo-colored backing sheet, and then use photoshop to create a file the laser cutter can use to cut out the foo-colored bits. (Probably some kind of vector file format, actually. People use Corel Draw quite a bit in the final working steps of getting art-type data into machine tools.)

If you don't wish to cut them, there are various types of camera-based book scanners you might make use of. Maybe a local university library might have one.

I've never looked into art grants. I'd start by hitting a book and workshop or two, and quiz my mentors.
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:36 PM on November 21, 2007

Also, ask here:
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/bookarts/
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:50 PM on November 21, 2007

Here's a neat bit about the Internet Archive's book scanner.
(Unlikely to apply to your friend's situation, unless the people there at University of Toronto are very friendly, but an interesting digression, perhaps.) Here are some of jessamyn's photos of the machine.

Easy enough to build your own, I imagine. It's just a camera, lights, sheets of glass, and some bits of metal or wood. Mind you, anodize it black and bodge together some software for the camera and you could sell it for $150K, probably.
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:34 AM on November 22, 2007

Checking out grants seems scarier than it is, but he's gotta get his butt in gear as deadlines pass all the time. Scour the lists on the right side of this page for visual arts grants and this page for writing and publishing grants.

Here's the "art books" grant.

Here's a project grant for visual arts, assuming he qualifies as a "professional artist" by the CCA's definitions. (I think you have to have had public exhibitions.

There are also endowments and such in visual arts and writing/publishing -- read through those too. And check out provincial and municipal programs and such. You can even apply online for the CCA ones.
posted by loiseau at 11:19 AM on November 22, 2007