Digitally constructing the book

 

I decided it would be best to create the illustrations in photoshop as it would allow me to very quickly create and change my layouts. The elements however are hand drawn and then scanned in at a high resolution to retain that hand drawn effect. However I really didnt like the look of this first attempt, it just looks so flat and boring not what I had in mind at all. In converstaion with Karenanne however she suggested that I worked with adding effects such as shadows and textures to the background to add depth and difference to the illustration.

Adding the shadow effects and the background to the illustrations really makes it come alive! Suddenly it doesnt feel as dead as before. While I like this alot more I still think it needs a bit more work to look really good. Thank god I am working on this digitally as I can work on this very easily.

This is what I eventually settled on, still keeping the shadows and the textures in the background however adding the all important paper texture. This texture in fact is a higher scan on my handmade paper and it works really well! It just make it look and feel really good, its actually quite hard to describe what it does for the illustration I just know that it works.

With the finished illustrations I then took them into InDesign to add the text to the book. Using InDesign was different for be but I can see why it is so much better for type and layouts, I wanted to keep it light hearted and fun so played around with this wavy type that works really well with the illustrations.

I played around with different font sizes and layouts, to see how want font size I needed and to see how it interacted with the imagery. I then went forward with a slightly curved type line as it worked best for all pages as a collective.

After attempting to work out how to print the book back to front in registers I landed on this technique where each spread was split into two halves, this then allowed me to have separate pages on one spread and this is the only way a double sided print would work. As you can see with the dramatic different on the spread above this is in-fact two halves of two spread that would then match up with the corresponding page when folded. This took a-lot of trial and error but I think I have finally worked out a way for this to work that also makes sense in my head. Now on to printing!