How I made my art book

The process of printing 300 copies

For my birthday this year, I chose to publish my Hong Kong paintings in a book that I gave to friends and paid subscribers of this Substack. I had always thought that getting ideas into paperback form was a huge undertaking, but it is nowhere as impossible as we might have thought. For one, we are over the era of publishers gatekeeping creatives because we can make our own project come to life as long as we put in the effort to edit, layout, and find a printing shop. We can make our own projects happen. I made this whole project happen in four months.

This is a documentation of the process.

Why a book?

Celebrating birthdays in Indonesia was a mutual give-and-take dynamic. The birthday person hosts a dinner or a lunch and pays for the meal, the guests bring gifts. Both parties (pun intended) provide what they can, according to their comfort level. The host can choose as cheap or as extravagant of a place they want, because they’re paying for it after all. The guests can bring gifts according to how much they are willing to spend. Best of all, everyone leaves with something (either gifts or a full stomach) and there’s no delay in waiting to return the favour because the “transaction” starts and finishes on the celebration day.

In Hong Kong, the birthday person seems to get everything. They not only get gifts, but friends will also split the cost of the birthday person’s meal. The birthday person can repay this in the future when it’s their friend’s birthday so they have to fork up both the birthday gift cost and their portion of the birthday person’s meal.

I couldn’t cover the birthday meal costs despite my hosting (I tried so many times in my ten birthdays since living in Hong Kong) so I thought it’d be cute to give something in return. But not just anything. I wanted it to be something personal. Something that my friends may have casually said “I’d want that!”.

That “something” is my art. Having brought my pocket sketchbook everywhere, my friends have commented that they would buy my art. When the first person said it, I thought they were just being nice. When the second person said it, I thought, “wow I have really nice friends”. When the third, fourth, fifth person said it… I had to make something out of their comments.

In the smidgets of time during my lunch breaks and after work, I set to put together an art book.

Self-printing

I didn’t want to be gatekept by a publishing house, so I decided early on that I would take on this project myself. I wanted to own the whole creative process of the book, typos and all. I wrote the preface, selected the 10% of my art that goes in the book, edited my own images, and chose the paper. It may not be perfect but it is mine.

Owning the process meant also owning the cost. It wasn’t cheap to pay for the printing upfront. I budgeted US$2,500 and ended up spending US$1,000 more. Paying all of this myself meant I didn’t owe anyone anything. There were no sales targets to be met. There were no distribution requirements.

Timeline

The project took four months to complete. I started in the beginning of 2024 and the deadline was my birthday, April 17. This timeline could be condensed if need be, but I was putting this together while still working full-time so I didn’t want to burn myself out doing it.

January: Scanning

I scanned all seventeen sketchbooks containing 526 paintings. I didn’t have a scanner, but I knew someone who did. I spent three afternoons feeding page after page into her magical light machine. My scanned files were saved into her cloud Dropbox folder so I could start sifting through them from my own laptop between each scan.

February: Selecting photos, editing, choosing paper and binding

Selecting and editing artwork: I looked at each scanned file and marked the ones I thought were good enough for the book. In the end I chose 68 paintings. That represented my top 13% of my art, and I figured it’ll be culled down to 50 depending on the layout. I started editing the pictures in Photoshop to bring out the vibrancy and contrast.

Printing options: I consulted my friend, who has experience in printing art books for museums before. I brought some art books that I was fond of to his place. We mulled over some paper and binding options. I wanted to mimic the intimacy my friends felt whenever they looked through my sketchbooks, so the book needs to be small and have textured paper that resembled the watercolour pages. I also wanted the book to lie flat when opened to accommodate some of my sketches that were spread across two pages.

We came up with the following specs:

• Thread binding

• Exposed thread binding

• Cream paper

• A5 size max

• 60 pages

• 200+ gsm for the cover, 118+ gsm for the inside pages, Royal Sundance paper

Consulting the printing shop: My friend sent our ideal specs to his go-to printing shop to ask for a price quotation. He said that we always start with the ideal specs, and then pick on some places we can compromise (e.g. paper weight) to bring down the cost to our budget.

March: Layouting and writing preface

Layouting: My friend was kind enough to help me layout the book, so I sent him the files, marking some artworks that could be used as the front or back cover. He said that paperback pages need to be multiples of four, so he ended up using all 68 artworks that I narrowed down: one on the front cover, one on the back, and 66 spread alongside the pages. I asked for four pages of text: two for the preface, one for an outro at the back and one to number the books. I wanted this to be a one-off limited run. Never to be printed ever again because I’d like to showcase new artwork in my maybe upcoming books if I ever decide to print more. Each book will be numbered accordingly. We traded the layouts back and forth, trying to catch any typos. We also bought a special font for this book. I wanted a sans serif one. My friend sent me some options, and we landed on Gellix.

Writing the preface: I sent the draft to two friends for their feedback:

Harrison Moore

and

nat

. Since there was no room for error in printing, I wanted it to be as polished as possible. After the text was finalized, I sent it off to my friend to include in the layout.

April: Printing and distribution

Printing: We went to the printing shop, determined they could do the exposed binding and had us pick a thread colour, selected a more affordable, regional paper option with the specs that we liked, and the paper for the covers.

We ended up with the following specs:

• Size: 21cm x 14.8cm (slightly smaller than A5)

• 72 pages at 110 gsm, ‘Natural U’ paper

• 2 cover pages at 220 gsm, ‘Natural U’ paper

• Exposed white thread binding

The shop gave me quotes for 200, 300, 400 books and I chose 300 (yes, I know they gave the 200 and 400 numbers to urge me towards 300 but the numbers don’t lie). 300 was a small enough quantity that they were able to make it work with a two-week production time, though since we have been in talks with them since March, they knew our order was coming in. The books arrived in the afternoon of April 16, just three hours before my birthday eve dinner celebration.

This is what 300 books look like.

Distribution: When I was contemplating on whether or not I should sell the book,

Steven Foster

convinced me to put it up as a bonus for people who become a paid subscriber to my Substack. Some of my friends didn’t know how to navigate Substack, so I set up a Gumroad listing too at the encouragement of

Paul Millerd

.

In Plein Sight

Turns out that printing a book is more straightforward than I thought. I couldn’t have done it had I not sought help from my friends. I did tell everyone who asked what I was working on. I honestly wasn’t familiar with the whole book printing process, but I either knew what the next step would be or knew someone who did. That’s all there is to making something.

Thanks to friends who added clarity to this documentation:

Rik

, Viktor,

clare chai

, and

Josh Ponelat

.

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Looking back: Peacocks used to be a symbol of homosexuality. The male peacock's flamboyant tail feathers were seen as a representation of non-heteronormative beauty. Men would wear peacock feathers to identify themselves to other homosexual men, and artists would incorporate the feathers into their artwork as a subtle way to signal their sexuality. Source: Trixie Motel - Drag Me Home episode 4 and Toby Leon.

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Update log:

• 📖 Reading The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco (57% completed). I’m not sure what I’m getting out of this book beyond the attitude towards getting rich (but not so much “how” per se). I’ll keep reading.

• 🎮 I’ve started on the third Phoenix Wright game: Trials and Tribulations. I’m playing versions remastered for the Switch.

• 🗺️ Played the board game Scythe, which has Catan vibes but is simpler and possibly shorter. It took us 45 minutes to set up but the play through was quick.

• 📷 Bought and broke a point-and-shoot film camera. I managed to save the film but looking at the results, I’m so much happier with images from my SLR. The camera shop was kind enough to replace it but the resulting images has nixxed my itch for a point-and-shoot camera.

• 🛥️ Spent Saturday on a boat, under the sun. I enjoy bopping on the water while catching up with friends. Though I missed sunscreening my knees so I have sun burns there.

• 🩺 I’m in the clear for ultrasound results and was told to check back in six months. Which is January 2025. What?!

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