I'm Alex Nail, ask me anything!

You’ve teed up a question for me, so thank you for that! Can you talk more about this? I want to have more of my own prints, but not necessarily for public display. Can you talk about how you are doing these, how are they organized, what resources are you using etc.?

So at the moment I have 2 collections on the go. One is a massive A2 Chicago post portfolio that has my ‘best of’ that I show to friends and cart around to talks. Truth be told it’s a bit too big - I should have done A3+ but I’ve already done 40 prints for it, so I guess I’m committed.

Then I have a few A4 clamshell boxes on the go that I am using to organise prints for my next book so that I can play around with sequencing but also get a feel for the images in print and exactly how I want to crop/edit for consistency etc.

When that book is printed I’ll be making a one off box for that too with extra space on top for A3 prints so that again I can take it to talks.

As to the practicalities of it….it’s a slow process to do by hand. A box would basically take me an entire day. You start by planning out the dimensions and then cutting bookboard/greyboard/millboard (I use 3mm thickness). If you are making a clamshell box you would create the the small tray first and then cover it. You cover it with bookcloth and fold and make very precise cuts with a scalpel to get perfect results. Then you repeat for the other tray and finally wrap the ‘case’ (the cover) before final assembly. You can see the full process here:

Hope that helps!

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