Making books :9 Dummy book

Well, putting printers aside for the moment- I'll show you my weird book making process. Remember the sheets of post-its with thumbnails a few posts back?

 I rearranged them in groups and in the order i wanted to have them read in. There are 4 sections in the book- Fanart. Original, comics and Mephistos. I then reformatted them paired up in page order with their page numbers. This lets you check out neighbouring pages and see which ones to match across two pages if necessary. It also lets you drop into place your inbetween and title pages.

[As everything is on post its, you can stick and unstick to rearrange too]
This helps for the next part- formatting:

First- I make up the page size- in this case, I opened a new file on international page sizes to A4. I then added an extra 3mm bleed on each side using canvas sizing. [If you add the extra using another background palette colour in photoshop- you can see where the bleed borders are on the first background layer- you can then use a guide to section it off. I also put guide on a 1cm safe area around the page as well.

I next added a plain white background layer for the page. I name it by the page number I'm using [say 64 like in the photo] and started finding the images i needed for that page. Having marked these out with the folder number and  which other pics are sharing the space, It's really just a matter of rearranging them.
At this stage I don't threshold or flatten everything as I'm just checking continuity, and I'll need to clean up the pictures as well.

I then continue creating the rest of the page layers in order.

Next part is to print in order. I usually do this a page at a time, running them through the printer for each page side. the end product is a lifesize book you can check though. I'm a bit rubbish at guaging pages on screen, so i much prefer seeing them in analogue, but you really don't have to do this. A lot of my comiking process though includes checking a print version to check read and flow and to see if the art is ok in real life.

Anyway, this version isn't printed on the best paper- [it's pretty thin] so it's not the way it would look in the final process, but I can now mark my edits and and write in any notes i want to include in the book.

Here's a video flickthrough of the contents of the book-

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk_3v7d3lmA