I’ve been spraying the edges of my paperbacks since June of 2025, after my friend Aly Hollis taught me how to. If you find any use from this tutorial, then buy one of her books as a thank you! I wouldn’t know how to do any of this without her.
*If you plan on doing designs
I suggest practicing/starting on books you don’t care if you’ll mess up. Go to Goodwill or a thrift store or take damaged books of your own. This way you can practice without ruining a book!
Sprayed edges are about more than just color – it’s also about design. If you’re going to make designs you’ll need some sort of cutting machine, like a Silhouette or a Cricut. I bought a Silhouette Cameo on FB marketplace for like $100. If you don’t plan on doing designs and just doing color, you can skip a few of the first steps.
If you’re going to put designs on your books, you need to measure the width and height of them. Height should be easy – you know the dimensions of your book (6×9, 5×8, etc). The width is what is going to vary from published work to published work.
Once you’ve measured you can design the sprayed edge. I do this in Canva. Create a design for the top, side and bottom. To make my life easier, I make the top and bottom the same design, though you can do what you want.
Open the design in your Cricut or Silhouette cutting software and cut out a sample. ALWAYS do a sample first! You can use this to see how easy it is to weed the design, determine if it’s an easy design or a pain in the ass, see how it looks in person, etc. I’ve also found these machines a little tricky, where sometimes they cut funny. Nothing is worse than throwing out a 12×12 of unusable material.
Make sure you’re cutting on PERMANENT vinyl! The temporary does NOT stick and it’ll blow off when you’re trying to spray it. I learned this the hard way.
I also weed my pattern while still on the cutting board.
If you’re happy with how it looks, cut out as many as you can. The good thing about this method of sprayed edges is you can do multiple books at once. Find the best balance for your clamps that allowed sprayed edges without a weird warp.
Once you’ve weeded your pattern, cover it with the transfer tape. Cut out your top, bottom and side pieces.
TIP – on the Silhouette Cameo I use force 20 and blade 3. This makes weeding WAY easier.
Align your books as best as possible and clamp them tight. The boards should cover your books so you don’t need to worry about taping or covering them like some tutorials show. This is where you realize that every time you order books, they print slightly different. Some of your books will be noticeably different in size. It’s annoying – try to align as best as possible.
You want your paint color to match your cover, which often means mixing and matching paints. I use https://trycolors.com/ to help mix paint. I’ll find a hex code that matches my book cover and put it into the calculator. Sometimes the formulas are difficult (165 drops of red to 3 drops of cyan), but it helps to get a general idea of how to mix the colors to match your cover.
You could make it easy, and just do black with white designs. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
https://www.liquitex.com has a great selection of paints. It’s going to be impossible to make EVERY book you ever sell the SAME color. I think finding the simplest formula that’s decently easy to emulate is your best bet.
Now that you’ve clamped your books, figured out your paint and design it’s time to apply the design to the edges. Peel the vinyl away from the transfer tape so the design is against the transfer tape. Press it against the side of your book – HARD. You want to really press the design in there to make sure it sticks to the pages. Peel back the transfer tape.
TIPS – If you’re putting a design over paint, make sure it dries first! When you remove the transfer tape it can take the paint with it. Be gentle and careful! If your vinyl pops off, replace it with tweezers. It’s tedious but worth it.
Now you’re ready! Fill your airbrush gun with your paint and do a quick test spray on something other than the books. Make sure you like the stream, the color, etc.
Now…paint. Try not to make too many layers, as this can make the pages stick and the book warp. Do enough to color the pages as evenly as possible.
The good thing about airbrush is it dries FAST. I saw some tutorials of using spray paint where the books needed 12+ hours to dry. Airbrush paint dries in seconds, if not minutes!
Take out the books and crack the spine to break up the paint. You can also remove the vinyl this way. Flip through the pages multiple times to ensure nothing is sticking together.
This tutorial is short, but the process is LONG. Figuring out the best cut for your machine, cutting the design, applying it to the pages…it takes a lot of time. Even if you’re spraying a flat color it’s still a lot of time and effort. Admire your hard work!