How to make Mold

We were recently at TCAF with early previews of Nick Borelli's MoldMoldMold book, and we had a lot of people talking about the cover that it just looked cool! TYSM! I'm super proud of how it turned out as well, and wanted to share a little behind-the-scenes detail about the background mold that is used on the cover bc in traditional peow2 fashion we spend a lot of time doing things that most ppl don't really thin about.

Anyways, all the "mold" on the cover and the endpapers is actually hand-made.

This is the original reference image we were using in the cover sketches.

In our early sketches, we found a really nice old image of mold that we were using as a placeholder for the background (we assume it's from some science textbook, but we could never find the OG source). It was one of those cases where we really fell in love with the original image and it fit perfectly, but it was not an image we could use for the actual cover.

A photoshop window with an image of the mold mold mold book inside of it.

Early drafts of the cover.

The image was just a bit too lo-res to use, and also, we didn't have a license to use it, so we did the next best-thing, which was to completely recreate the random image we found on the internet by hand.

The book itself is really inspirational and really had us really excited about the idea of doing everything by hand and using different paints and materials to make something cool. Initially we were going to just grow mold, but it would take too long and we didn't know what it would look like. Instead we did something more straightforward. We already have a bunch of hobby supplies at home it made sense to use what was around us. Plus it's just really nice to do design work away from a computer screen and just working in the moment.

Five dropper bottles of acrylic ink and two small pots of hobby grass texture and sand

Materials used

Mold recipe: Acrylic inks, grass flock, water, watercolor paper, sand and some round cookie cutters to get nice round circle shapes for the mold. With those items, we spent a day just experimenting and made a bunch of little patches of fake mold.

a swatch with different styles of fake mold created with paint and sand

These are the original bits of fake mold we made.

Once there were enough samples to use, we took photos, cleaned them up and did some color adjusting. Then in photoshop we collaged it all together while using the OG reference image as a guide. It wasn't meant to match it perfectly, but rather get a similar vibe, and I gotta say we are super happy with how it turned out.

an image that is meant to look like mold but in fact, not actually mold.

Final result!

Anyways! The book comes out at the end of the June, it's rlly good! That's all for now, byeeee

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