Last year I licensed one of my Celtic art designs to a company that makes embossed leather journals for both retail and wholesale customers. These showed up awhile back on the wholesale site; I’ve been waiting for them to appear at the retail site before I posted about them.
The upper picture’s from the web site. Down below there’s one I took of the sample they sent me.
This is a variation on a pentacle design that I did about fifteen years ago. It’s one of the most popular of my Celtic designs, and it’s also so widely pirated that I doubt I’ll ever do anything like it again. The problem we faced here is that the image never existed as a line drawing, and what you need for the embossing die is a simple line art treatment.
The original image was painted directly in Photoshop and now, so many years later, I only have a few of its layers isolated. So an artist at the company reverse engineered a line art version so that they’d have one.
It’s a really nice job – it’s much better than I expected – and the only quibble I’d make is that we lost the dragons in the wide circular band. Chances are they had so many tiny details that they just weren’t practical here, so they’ve been replaced with a pattern of spirals. The dragons in the corners did survive, though, and I guess that was a heck of a lot of dragons anyway.
You can just see in the second picture how the cover wraps around into a flap behind the latch. The back cover and flap are also embossed (though not with designs by me) and there’s even a narrow stripe of knotwork that runs around the spine and the outer edge of the flap. I’m really pleased with them.
The journals are available in brown or in black, with 120 pages of handmade linen paper, at $32.95 each.
