Hurtwood
 

Sabina Savage: A Savage Kingdom

Produced & Published for Sabina Savage

Outline

A Savage Kingdom is the first publication on artist and designer Sabina Savage’s eponymous luxury brand, marking its tenth anniversary. Sabina creates her own visual world informed by nature, myth and history in exquisite hand-drawn illustrations printed on silk and cashmere scarves. A Savage Kingdom explores the fascinating narratives behind some of her most successful drawings to date, meandering across continents and diving headfirst into the depths of legends.

Grouped by collections, A Savage Kingdom guides readers through the details and symbolism contained within each design, presenting large-scale images of the pencil drawings and full-colour prints of the scarves. Sabina weaves in stories of the almost life-sized wooden semi-automaton tiger of Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century ruler of Mysore in South India; Victorian zoological and botanical illustrators who travelled across the world in the hope of discovering new species; Japanese Noh theatre from the Edo period and the royal beasts, including ostriches, elephants and grizzly and polar bears, who were housed at the Tower of London’s Menagerie from the 1200s, to name a few. She does not shy from the brutality of nature or her source material, which cast a shadow of unease over many of her works.

Writer Zoë Lescaze introduces the book, covering Sabina’s development as an artist and the tensions between humans and other animals at play in her designs. Limited to an edition of 1000 books A Savage Kingdom is for devotees of the brand and those new to it alike, who are interested in drawing, craftsmanship and fantastic tales.

The Process

The book is a generous 350mm x 270mm in portrait format. Sabina wanted her book to be closer in size to some of the great illustrated books of the past, slightly more imposing than the usual sizes, and with a broader canvas to reproduce her work both in full but also at a reduced size. She wanted to capture the full-scale image with enough detail to show the work—a coffee table book that would need a slightly larger coffee table! Browsing through our shelves with Sabina, we landed on ‘La Californie,’ the story of Picasso’s stay at the eponymous house in the south of France. This beautiful title, printed on soft white paper and with a printed cloth case, provided a great launching point for our book.

The Design

Hurtwood chose This Side, the design studio of Myfanwy Vernon-Hunt, to design the book. Myfanwy is a specialist editorial designer whose expertise in book design for galleries, museums, and publishers made her the perfect choice. Myfanwy collaborated closely with Sabina and the team at Hurtwood to create a design that was sensitive to Sabina’s work.

The Paper

After careful consideration, the book’s 200 pages were printed on 150g Garda Kiara paper from the Garda mill in northern Italy. This paper has a beautiful soft white shade and a surface that, to the look and touch, feels uncoated but allows the colour ink to lift and shine. This glorious and non-reflective paper will allow our text to be read easily, our pencil drawings to have subtlety and gentle shading, and our colour to lift from the page.

Reprography

All the reprography, artworking, colour reproduction, and print management were done in-house at Hurtwood, with the artist approving all colour iterations. For colour proofing, we treated the pencil separately from the rest of the colour. We established and agreed on the tonal range of paper and pencil before printing tests for both full-colour images and pencil pages on press. The main aim of proofing and all the pre-press work is to eliminate surprises and produce a printed result that is exactly what the client expected.

The Printing

The covers and pages were printed in four colours on a Heidelberg press at Hampton, a Bristol based printers renowned for their award-winning work reproducing accurate colour in print. Hurtwood, Hampton and Sabina spent over four days on press working together to realise the colours that accurately reflect Sabina’s own scarves.

The content of the book, which covers the ten years since the beginning of the brand, had been meticulously photographed and recorded by Sabina, so there was plenty of material for the book. However, as is often the case, the quantity and quality of the photography improved as time went on, and it was necessary to balance and work a little on some of the images where the style and lighting balance differed, and a re-shoot wasn’t possible. This was especially true for the beautiful pencil drawings that formed the basis for so many exquisite and elaborate designs. Pencil is extremely difficult to reproduce sensitively, with small variations in paper and pencil tone often becoming exaggerated and clumsy when printed. To overcome this, we chose a paper shade we liked and created a small variation across a short range of tone, and onto this, printed the pencil tones.

The Binding

The book cover was created by printing one of Sabina’s beautiful images onto a specialist book linen (Windsor offset cloth). Our experience with printing on linen meant we were aware of potential challenges. First, we were dealing with woven material, and since printing also uses a screen to separate the component colours, there is a possibility of a moiré (screen clash) between the mesh of the weave and the mesh of the screen. To overcome this, we used a hybrid screen in our printing process, combining conventional ‘grid’ style screens with stochastic screens, where the screen is removed in favour of a random pattern of equally sized dots. We chose this hybrid pattern rather than simple stochastic because Sabina wanted a lot of colour control on press, which is only possible using conventional ‘grid’ style screens. The book title on the cover was blocked over the printed linen in a subtle antique gold foil from FoilCo. The binding was completed with Ratchfords head and tail bands in coordinating silver colour. The book cover was finished with endpapers from GF Smith on Colorplan Mist, chosen for its strength and proven consistency in creating a high-quality finish to a book.

The book has been designed, proofed, printed and bound in the UK.

Produced and published by Hurtwood, designed by This Side, printed by Hampton,  distributed by Thames & Hudson in the UK and ACC Art Books in the US.

Available to purchase on Sabina Savage’s website here and in your favourite bookshop.