Last week we saw this "antiqued" Kolo Cortina Luxury photo album transformed into an Organ Grinders book in this very cool Kolo hack by Steve Light. He had previously shown how he soaked it in tea… then dried it out over a few days… then what it looked like interestingly worn and warped. He did to this book what time does to a face – he gave it character.

Here's Steve's description of his Organ Grinders illustrations:

I've been working on the Organ Grinders book… here are a few sample pages. This was a big breakthrough project for me. My first published children's books (Puss in Boots and The Shoemaker Extraordinaire) were done in collage, which is fun, but my first love is drawing and I wanted to get back to that.

Anyway, usually I pencil in my drawings first, but for this Organ Grinders book, I decided to draw directly onto the page with ink. It was liberating and exciting and a lot of fun! I’d draw a little thumbnail sketch on a different piece of paper on the side just to get an idea of what I wanted, then draw it again with ink directly onto the book page. I would make little mistakes sometimes, but that was OK because trying to fix and hide the little mistakes would cause me to come up with new creative ideas.

I used a really cool fountain pen called a Pelikan Souverän M805. I had the nib custom ground by Richard Binder (who is very well known in the fountain pen world) and I loved the results! On his web site www.richardspens.com he sells pens and repairs vintage pens and he custom grinds nibs. (There's a questionnaire that you fill out that gives him all kinds of details such as at what angle you hold the pen, how wet you want the nib… people have all kinds of preferences.) I like a lot of ink on the nib because I really like the ink to go down on the page. This pen was ground in such a way that, depending on how I hold it, I can get a broad line, a medium line, or a really fine line. It's fantastic.

The paper was great to draw on. I love the Kolo Cortina Lux photo album -– it's my favorite sketchbook because of its shape and size and great quality archival paper. Normally bleeding or feathering would not happen with Kolo paper, but because I soaked this album in tea and deliberately compromised it, when I drew on the dried pages, the ink did bleed a little. In this case, I didn't mind, because I was going for that aged, wonderfully imperfect look.

I even deliberately splattered ink on some of the drawings, which the high quality fountain pen I used normally would not do, either! But sometimes you want to create those "flaws" in your art to achieve a certain look. Like the stains you see on the pages – those I created on purpose by leaving tea leaves directly on the pages while I was drying out the album.

More of Steve Light's Organ Grinders drawings later today. Stay tuned.