Dundas Street

Yo, long time no see. Sorry about the late reply, I forgot to check messages. As for the Cherik rec list, did you mean my old fic recs illustrated tag? That’s the only thing that comes to mind atm.

One fic that I never managed to illustrate is actually my personal favourite All Along the Watchtower along with its sequel Education. It’s a really fun minor AT/fixit fic with snappy writing and dialogue. Another favourite is Wisteria which is more introspective iirc.

Full image of my submission to the Touken Ranboo zine! The details took a while, but it was worth it.

Preview of my submission for the Touken Ranboo zine. Great excuse to draw hyakki yagyou themed art.

Izumi Kyouka's The Saint of Mt. Kouya/Holy Man of Mt. Kouya aka the happy boss rush map. A flashy book for a flashy(?) story with lush descriptions about a travelling monk running into all sorts of strange things. Due to its length, regular double-sided signatures were used, and since Izumi's said to be a very Japanese writer, I went with retchoso or tetsuyousou binding which is believed to have no Chinese counterpart. Apparently some binders use four needles at once for this method @_@. Couldn't figure out how to get a nice tight binding, but it's still very sturdy. Maybe the signatures need to be pressed for longer? The book lies open completely flat, so I reused the margin settings from Tokuda's.

Resources/tutorials used: http://www.intangible.org/Features/koya/koyahome.html - Full text of the story

http://gatzbcn.blogspot.ca/2013/03/japanese-bookbinding-tutorial-tutorial.html http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~dawe5/bookbinding_pages/BB_sewn2.html https://www.nla.gov.au/blogs/preservation/2014/02/10/discovering-a-retchoso-sewn-book-on-my-desk-via-asian-collections

Been playing Bungou to Alchemist lately, so what better excuse to pick up bookbinding? The text is Tokuda Shuusei’s Order of the White Paulownia, a short story about a woman dealing with an imperfect marriage. Its shortness and plain writing style made it a good beginner’s project imo. The book was bound fukurotoji style with the spreads folded and the loose ends sewn, so the pages had to have the outer margin and gutter reversed.