When I first started discovered the
wondrous green stuff, the only book you could find in the bookstore was
Sumita Batra's "The Art of
Mehndi". I love it because I'm a really visually-oriented person and it had lots of really beautiful photos. The design patterns featured in the book were easy enough to figure out and the photos gave me something to inspire me to want to become accomplished as quickly as possible!
Nearly eight years later I still have that book. I still take it to every event because her photos are much better than mine! I'd say the majority of the people who come to look grab that book first. I usually set up with my ugly binder books open to some beautiful pattern and just leave the SB book closed so all they see is the cover. I don't know what it is, but it's the one that nearly everyone is drawn to. One of these days I'm going to buy one of the other books with pretty
mehndi on the cover just to see what people go for.
Most of the events I do are
Rennaisance Faires. I've often thought about creating a more 'period' looking book to display at
faire. The modern plastic binder with the plastic
snapout treasured
HennaPage book design pages draws the strangest looks from the
rennies. Every year I try to get a little more 'period' so maybe I'll work on that over the winter this year.
The books I've purchased from
HennaPage.com are one of the best things I've ever spent money on for a few reasons. First, I always get my stuff quickly, I like quickly very much! I hate to order things online mostly because I have no patience when it comes to spending money. If I buy something I want to be able to touch it right away! I want to be able to try out patterns immediately, so waiting just makes me nuts. The longest it's ever taken me to get a pattern book from the
HennaPage people is about six hours, much better than several days for it to come from some warehouse on the other side of the country! Another reason is that I can store the files on my
pc and my laptop as well as having them in books. I take my laptop everywhere I can justify taking it with, and sometime even if I can't justify it like that random trip to
McDonalds to bug my daughter at work now that they have free
WiFi. All of the books I've bought are there anytime I want to show someone patterns. If I could store them on my Zen and figure out how to access them I would have them there, too! I'm just a little overly technologically needy. Yes, there are henna photos on my phone, but I have the Buddha as my background for balance. So my point is, the digital design books are really great for geeks like me. And there's the fact that if you wreck a page or lose one you can always just reprint that one. My copy of
SB's book has countless little brown dots and blobs.
If you're not lucky enough to have oodles of cash to throw into brandy new books or are looking for a cheaper way to get your hands on patterns now that you've found all the free ones, there are a couple of different options available for the frugal artist. By far the cheapest route to acquiring design books is getting them used at Amazon. Some of them are cheaper than the shipping to get them to you! So if you have little cash and lots of patience, you can get a great selection of design books this way.
Another site I discovered this morning that I thought would be great for those of us working on the financially challenged end of the scale is
BookRenter.com. Great concept right? I thought, hey, this way I can see inside the book and decide if it's worth actually buying instead of being like 'back in the day' when you wanted a song and spent $20 or more gambling that you'd like at least one more song on the CD. Nothing sucks like a $20 song. Thankfully we now have all these music services that allow people like me to just get exactly what they want now. But when you're buy books online you can't look inside and see if you like more than the one pattern on the front. So hey, rent it, good idea I thought, right? Apparently wrong! So far all of
mehndi books that I've found are for purchase only. There are a couple of good deals here, but
overall the prices are comparable to the new book prices at all the major online booksellers. A couple of them are more expensive than you can find them elsewhere. For example,
CCJ's The Joyous Body Art, Pattern Book 1 is $24.74 at
BookRenter.com, $24.99 at Amazon.com, $67.02 at
LangtonInfo.com (what are these people thinking???), $22.49 for members at
BarnesandNobel.com, and just $10 if you order the electronic version at
TDL(
CCJ's TapDancingLizard.com). So take a second to
google the book title and author to see if you can save yourself a few dollars. And hey, maybe I'll need to rent some other kind a book eventually...
Personally, I like the idea of going directly to the artist. If I can get a book at
HennaPage.com, I get it there first. If you like a certain artist and they sell their own book on their site, buy it there. Usually an artist gets the most profit and the least hassle that way, which most of the time means you're getting the best deal, too. And if can't get it from the artist, I want it cheap, so I go through Amazon because I have an account there. Might as well make a couple of cents off my own purchases while I'm at it, right?
I
