Sugar Skull Book is Complete

I embedded a switch, Attiny85, and a 3V coin cell battery.

This is the front view of the front cover.

After doing quite a few sugar skull prototypes, I have finally used the design in a book binding project!  I plan to fill this 8 X 8 inch journal with pictures of my parents and momentos from Arizona.

Something that worked well here was using a copper-colored acrylic ink to paint around the artwork, rather than leaving the Canson mixed media paper a boring white. Sealing the colored pencil sketch with acrylic gel medium gives the cover an additional glow.


While I am generally happy with the way that this book turned out, I've concluded that I may need to use a thicker binder's board if my goal is to do an elegant job of hiding a recessed battery.

In this model, the majority of my focus was on getting the artwork to line up with the circuit. If I could go back and do it all over, I would position the hole for the battery another half inch away from the corner to provide more wiggle room for creating a flap to conceal it.


I had fun soldering the LEDs to the copper tape, but one of the LEDs that I selected for the eyes stopped working after I sewed the signatures into the book!

After bending the cover a bit, it worked again, but now my front cover has a slight bend to it.

I wish the hole for the battery was further from the corner!

   

This is the back view of the front cover.

Here's how I laid out my circuit.

The inside features a variety of different papers; I plan to decorate them later.