Valentine How-To: "Mad Love" Game Book

My partner and I love to do Mad Libs together, and we have gone through many of their books, including the romance one that inspired this Valentine's project.

This "Mad Love" book will be 5.5" x 8.5," so plan your paper accordingly. I made my inner pages in Photoshop, but would have been a little bit easier in a word processing program. For content, I drew from romantic things we both enjoy, such as movie plots with quotes, song lyrics, book passages and old blog posts. Here is an example page:

I found for movies it was straightforward to use plot synopsis from IMDB, and then include your favorite quote at the end. For song lyrics, don't forget the helpful word type of "rhymes with ...," since non-rhyming lyrics aren't as fun. In addition to your standard parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, adverb), throw in some that are more specific such as "occupation," "silly word," "place," or "famous people." The ever classic "person in room" should not be overlooked.

For my book I did about 10 pages, but more or less would be cool considering how much time or interest you have.

Next the cover:

This is a blank template for you to fill in as a cover. You can download it directly from my Flickr site here. For the Photoshop savvy, go ahead and use a close-up image (camera phone style super close-ups work great for this) into the green square. For the less computer inclined, try printing out a photo or photocopying one and cutting it to fit in the square and gluing it in place.


Cover your eyeballs with the classic style googly eyes to make it look like the original store bought versions. You can download them on my Flickr, again. If you're only semi-experience with Photoshop, note that once you select the eyeballs and paste them into the image, EDIT > FREE TRANSFORM, is useful in this situation. Again, for the non-computer option, scale your eyeballs up or down and glue onto the faces.


Here is my finished cover. I printed it out on card stock, but if you don't have any, print on regular paper and then glue to something stiffer. At this point I also got all of my interior pages cut down to 5.5" x 8.5," and cut a backing piece of cardboard the same dimensions.


You've done all of the hard parts already, now we just staple the pieces together, like so.


And I covered the staples and top edge with fabric tape to give it a more polished feel.


I'm really excited to give this to my Valentine, and I hope that you have fun making some too.

~Kari
http://ikyoto.etsy.com