Before I sent my book off for printing, I wanted to create a few mockup books for development and tests. I find it difficult to spot mistakes that I’ve made when looking on a screen, and also I wanted to get a rough guide of how the colours would look.. I had a bit of difficulty in double sided printing, and making sure that each page had the right page beside it, so it became easier to print it in the order that I wanted, and then glue each page together rather than printing and stapling. This was time consuming, but ultimately easier than arranging documents by staring at a screen for hours. For this blog post, the relevant images and the links to the video will be above the text, as there are approximately 100 different photos in all my development books combined (plus more duplicates), so I thought it would be easier to show a flip through version online.
All large videos that will be on my blog, will have to be in the format of a YouTube video as the blog only hosts 50mb videos, and any compression software either ruins the quality of the video, or is too large a video to even compress. I have made them so that you can only access the videos with a shareable link (the link on this blog).
I created a black and white version with the line art that I had used for my final book, and the accompanying black and white text, with the greyscale version of my book cover. I really liked how this looked, as it printed correctly and was very similar in layout to how I wanted my final book to look, only the line art version. I kept the scale small, first printing the inside pages and measuring the width of the spine, I scaled up my cover by that measurement of approximately 0.6mm, so that the cover image could stretch to fit the full width of the spine, front and back cover. It felt very resolved, as it was clean and neat, and due to the black and white nature, there was clear consistency throughout.
I also made a colour version with all of my final illustrations and coloured text, but forgot to switch it to landscape mode when printing, which resulted in a more calendar-like effect. I didn’t like this book as much as my line art version, as I was quite disappointed with the colours and how the black writing showed up on the text. My final book will be printed with the text to the right of the illustration, as that is the way that western books are formatted. I hope that in the finished book, the colours are more accurate to how they looked on my screen. I decided to use a solid colour red card page for the cover, rather than my book cover design, as messing up the format originally, had created a different style book and I thought that a solid cover would show the development better. I used my toggle case handwriting and stuck it to the front, ultimately having to add a band of yellow to the spine as I had slightly mis-measured and it didn’t fit quite right.
When looking at my peers illustrations, I was conscious of the fact that a lot of my development for both my final piece and earlier digital pieces, was entirely online and not a lot of it was printed out. I wanted to create two little printed books that showed some of my development in a way that was easier to see than only being able to view it on my blog or computer files. I started off by arranging my development pages into a folder, in the order that I wanted them to be in my book. I then created a pdf version, printing it and folding each page in half, and sticking those sides together. I had originally planned on making this into one book, however I found that it worked better when I used one version as a copy that had my rough sketches and line work, and the second one with my different colour versions and a few select layers. Although these were very time consuming to make, I’m really glad that I made them, as I do believe it makes my work stronger by being able to visually see and hold the development books, rather than just online. I plan to display them as accompanying sketchbooks for my final submission.