Start with the strawberries. Hand painted fruit, leaves and white blossom crowd a raspberry ground across the front of 100 Days of Art Play, circling a cream cloud of hand lettered title. It is the cover of an artist who knows colour, and the pages behind it keep that promise.
Cornish artist and illustrator Lee Foster-Wilson runs Bonbi Forest, her label of illustrated gifts and stationery. This A4 book gathers the work she made during a hundred-day creative challenge, one piece a day, fitted round family life. We printed it perfect bound on silk, so the best introduction is to turn it over in your hands, front to back. Sitting on a body of work that needs covers? See how we approach art books and catalogues for illustrators.
Strawberries on a raspberry ground
The cover board is 300gsm silk, its outer face sealed under matt film. That weight survives being picked up, passed round and propped open on the arm of a sofa, while the film takes the gleam off the surface so the reds and greens look deep rather than glassy. A bold painted cover is a gift when you promote a book online, and the laminate keeps every copy you post out looking like the one in your photos.
An olive spine with a wavy edge
Stack a few copies and the spine takes over. It is a deep olive, lettered by hand in white beside a tiny strawberry and sprig, and the olive wraps onto the front in a wavy edge, so the cover painting seems to sit inside a painted border. Perfect binding gives a square spine fit for a bookshop shelf, and with 122 inside pages there is real width to letter. Making an art book of your own? Treat the spine as part of the artwork, not a strip of leftover space, and read how we set up artwork for a glued paperback spine before you design it.
Apricot behind the front cover
Lift the front and the inside cover is printed a soft, flat apricot, peeling back from a full bleed painting of a bird, a moth and a dragonfly on deep green. When Lee first asked us to quote, she priced a hardback alongside the paperback and asked whether the hardback’s endpapers could be a plain colour. She chose the paperback, and printing both inside covers in one warm tone gives the book a coloured threshold all the same. Anyone pricing a paperback can borrow the idea: a printed inside cover makes the first turn feel considered.
The title spread and a running day count
The first spread letters the title by hand across teal florals and butterflies, facing a swirl of violet petals, both pages full bleed. From there the paintings take turns. Some run edge to edge; others sit within white margins above a small serif caption naming the day, such as Day 13, Blossom and Grow, or Day 15, In Nature We Trust. The palette travels through deep blues and violets, hot pinks, raspberry reds and leafy greens, with strawberries and stars, a beaming sun, a lucky black cat, birds and moths along the way.
The 122 inside pages are 130gsm silk with colour on both sides, the weight our form recommends and the one Lee picked. Silk holds the punch of marker, ink and paint, keeps fine lettering sharp and holds dark painted grounds deep instead of muddy. At 130gsm a long book still turns easily. Weighing up stocks for your own art? Here is how coated and uncoated papers compare in print.
Margin notes, a Hockney line and a page of stars
Between the paintings, Lee shows her working in notes lettered by hand. One, headed Trying something new, explains a pre-painted background in pink, yellow and orange that “proved difficult to work on” until she painted a new ground around it and left the bright colours showing through. A pink floral page carries David Hockney’s line, “Drawing makes you see things clearer and clearer still until your eyes ache.” A page of white stars on a dark ground, suggested by her daughter, rescues one of “those pesky dark backgrounds”.
Another spread, Advice on Starting a Daily Creative Project, pairs photos of Lee painting at her desk and a heap of papers painted in advance with practical tips: set some boundaries, schedule the work, share it if that keeps you going. “Creating every day has enormous benefits, and it doesn’t have to be for 100 days.” Those pages turn a portfolio into an invitation, and they are the detail we would urge other artists to copy. Print the process alongside the finished pieces.
Lee’s hundred days became a paperback through our printing for self-published books; a challenge of any length can take the same route.
Lee already knew us, as we had printed her Bonbi Forest notebooks. For this book she asked for two quotes side by side, hardback and perfect bound, on the same A4 size and paper, so she could weigh the formats on feel and budget. The extent crept up while she assembled the sequence, finishing at 122 inside pages plus the cover. Once printed, it went on pre-order through her own shop and later sold out.
Illustrators gathering a run of daily work into one volume can borrow Lee’s recipe outright: A4, perfect bound, printed in four colours on 130gsm silk, its cover sealed under a matt laminate. Cost that build through our art book printing page.
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
Product cataloguesA5, 28 pages, stapled£166for 100
