The Book of IOZ

This is a work in progress. It was started several years ago, and then was set aside. I still have it, and someday I may finish it, or maybe not. I only have this one picture of it at the moment. I will put up a few more if I have time. The book itself was a 5"x8" blank book with a black bonded leather cover and unlined pages. I can get them fairly cheap (around $6) from one of my wholesalers. As an experiment, I decided to paint each page with a generous slathering of my paper aging mixture (tea and instant coffee), which ended up soaking the whole book. In an other experiment, I tried to see how it might dry in the microwave at work. Hint: Things do not dry in a microwave. It did, however, get very hot, warp the book boards, and the pages, and wrinkled the bonded leather covering. At first I hated it and thought that I had pretty much ruined the book, but after a while, I started to like it. It definitely looks weathered. The book boards are flattened out some now, and the wrinkled covering looks quite authentically old and haggard.

It is actually the source of many of my more inspired pieces of art (seals and geometrics and the like). Since the book was already bound (and weathered) all the contents had to be filled in by hand, which is mostly why it isn't finished yet. I had envisioned it as being a sort of cultist's journal, documenting the eldritch lore that he accumulated. I started by drawing in a title page, thus naming the tome "Liber IOZ". Then I peppered in a few original drawings of occult seals and strange geometric diagrams. I just put them in at random intervals throughout the book, figuring I would then back fill the empty pages in between with cryptic writings. Later I ended up scanning the pages to get the images out of the book so I could use them for other projects. That was a challenge since the pages were already aged. The images had to be cleaned up in photoshop rather extensively.

As time went on, I would insert text as the mood struck me. I ended up creating a small bit of Mythos around some of the seals I had drawn, such as "Cthigla" and "Ag-hoth", and other "Pipers of the Void". If I ever get around to taking a few more pictures of the tome, I'll post about a little of its Mythos too. I use it quite often in my other creations. It has become more of a reference work for me than another project to be finished.