Working on Come Along Planner

Lart was back in SF from Berlin after spending a week in New York with Yvonne working the stationery show. She stayed at our house part of the time while we all took turns working on cleaning up the landscape she drew for the Come Along Planner. Design intern (and friend) Kristine was nice enough to come work overtime helping Lart put the landscape together.

Lart and Kristine hard at work on the Come Along Planner

One of the long work sessions was at our apartment. Yvonne made this amazing rice & quinoa dish while I watched the fantastic documentary Life in the Undergrowth (which i highly, highly recommend), pretty much avoiding working as much as i could. After a few days we all easily put in 10 hours each getting rid of paper texture and trying to get the landscape to match the rest of the page. It's basically neccessary grunt work, but essential to making a consistant looking page. Especially because this planner consists of one very long landscape (over 60 feet long!) that was drawn over time and consists of different textures and styles, all drawn with colored pencil.

Yvonne originally had the idea after we went to a book art exhibit at the NY Public Library based on the Japanese Ehon books and seeing a long scroll that told the story of a man and his friend traveling down a river and recording everything he saw from the boat. It was an amazing exhibit about a basically unknown art (Ehon) and it has had a definite effect on how we have thought about our books since (this planner being the obvious case in point). The NY Public Library website has great info and photos of Ehon books if you are so interested.

Lart is back in Berlin now still working on the landscape and after that Kristine will start collecting pages and putting them together in InDesign for us to do our final editing. Then maybe we'll get some sleep, but probably not as when Lart was here we had one of our all night ideas sessions and came up with a good 5 new possible projects that we are already working on and thinking about. We miss Lart a lot and it was great to have her back. Even when she broke my deoderant.... But, that's another story for another time.

But seriously, Life in the Undergrowth is awesome; rent that thing.