'Friends' Of The Library (Appearance Is Everything)

Here are a few images of the finished book!

Final Pages

Here are the images of how the pages turned out.

Double spread Outer Cover

Double Spread Inside Cover

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

Page 8

Making My Book

Once I started to gain some control over my symptoms, I started work on my book. First off I drew the line art for the pages. Most of the time I just drew it straight onto the page, but sometimes I decided to draw figures separately and then incorporate them onto the page.

The next stage was adding the colour with inks. To do this, and to keep the line art I had drawn, I enlisted the help of my trusty light box. With this, I was able to place a piece of watercolour paper over the line art whilst light box was on, and paint over the areas in the colours that I required.

                                         

  

The next step that was needed was to place the ink washes under my line art in the appropriate areas using layering in Adobe Photoshop. For example, the brown washes were placed under the hair and full page colour washes for backgrounds were placed right at the back. Once the line art and ink washes were in place, I started to add in speech bubbles and text where needed. 

For the front covers I repeated some of the same processes. I did the line art for them, placed the images where I needed them to be, then layered the images with the washes I had done. I placed the titles where I wanted them to be on the front cover, The main title at the top and the sub title at the bottom. For the background colour I ended up using a dribbled green watercolour wash I had created on watercolour paper.

For the inside parts of the cover of the book, I ended up creating a collage of famous book covers to relate to the literary domain of the library.

Once I had finished the images on Photoshop, I printed the inside pages of the book at home on my home printer. I then used the printers at Uni to print both sides of my cover on A3 card (inside cover and outside cover). The final stages were to then to use the Uni's book binder to stick the pages of each book to each separate cover, all 16 copies I made! Finally I used a guillotine to cut the books down to make them look all neat and tidy. All done and dusted! 

  

An Unfortunate Setback

During the whole of the process leading up to me creating my final major project, and even a long time before, I had been feeling unwell. Whilst I was struggling to create work for this project, I ended up seeing a doctor in March who sent me to have a hospital appointment. During this time, my productivity fell quite far behind the time plan I originally planned to complete this project due to stress and worry. In late March I was finally diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis, and was put on medication to control my symptoms. Because of the stress of waiting to find out my diagnosis and struggling to work whilst living with my symptoms at their worst, my original plan of doing four separate comics had to be abandoned due to time constraints. Instead I aimed to make one comic in time for the London Book Fair. The planned comic was a title called 'Appearance Is Everything', based on a lesson I had learnt from my time working at the library.

Cover Ideas

After choosing my style of drawing, my media, and page layout style, I decided to go about creating some possible cover designs. The first thing to decide was what font I was going to use.

After trying a few different ones, I ended up settling on the Impact Label Reversed font. This decision was mainly based on the fact that the style reminds me of the labels we have at work to classify books.

For the cover itself, I decided I wanted to have the title of the series of books at the top, and I also wanted a subtitle of the story at the bottom of the page. These were a few rough ideas I had for two of my stories.

           

Simplifying Figures Down

During my process of practising my figure drawing, I realised that when it came to drawing figures in the situations that I wanted them in, I just couldn't draw the figures realistically. This could possibly be due to the fact that I had grown up with mainstream comics such as the Marvel publications, and automatically tried to emulate their style of working.

So when I realised that method of working wasn't suited to me, I decided to try and simplify my figures down. To help me with this, I drew inspiration from such publications as The Beano comics, and the works of illustrator Bryan Lee O'Malley (Scott Pilgrim & Lost At Sea).

I also looked at how certain animation studios simplify characters down, looking at animations such as Family Guy, American Dad and The Simpsons, who not only simplify their characters down but also exaggerate certain features of a persons appearance to create a comical effect, for example the size of the father's strong jaw bone in American Dad to exaggerate the character's alpha male nature. In these animations, and also in the publications above, I found that simplifying things down actually complimented their light hearted humorous stories, which is what I wanted for my stories. If the figures had been drawn anatomically correct, the mood of the pieces may have changed to be more serious.

After looking at their simplified styles, I tried tried out using a more simplistic approach to my figures. The outcome actually proved, in my opinion, to compliment the feeling of the humour of the stories I had written, and I ended up liking simplifying the characters, so the experiment turned out to be a very positive one.

Book Construction

For gaining ideas of how to go about creating my books there were really two options, either send my pages off to get printed professionally or print the book myself. As I have said previously, I rather like the look of comics that go against the professional look of the mainstream comics, and I also like the appearance of something that looks like it has taken time and effort into making. After looking at what facilities were available to me, I took the decision that I wanted to make the the books myself. The question I then asked myself was in what way would I choose to make it myself.

 The first thing I took into consideration was what size they were going to be. Usual mainstream comics are around about 9.5 inches by 6.5 inches, so the first thing that came to me was do I stay the same size, or do I go bigger or smaller? I knew that I wanted my books to look different to the regular comics, so I tried out different sizes, along side different materials as well.

The first experiment I tried was to go smaller, this was to try out what it would look like as a little booklet type comic. I also tried using quite flimsy card and bound the pages together with staples. Looking at the end result of this experiment, I realised that not only was the size too small, but the flimsy card just didn't fit my vision of what I wanted the books to look like.  

For my second experiment, I decided to increase the size of the book to A4 size. I also tried using a rougher card for the cover, and used separate sheets of Ripple Embossed white card for the inside pages. I bound the book using the university's professional book binder, which uses a special glue to hold the pages of the book to the cover. Whilst I liked the feel of the texture of the card on the pages, and the binding process to hold everything together, I found I wasn't that fond of the rough card for the cover. I also didn't think the card would cope well with the printing process. I decided to try and find a smoother, yet still strong type of card for the cover.

 
In the end, I found a sturdy yet smoother type of cream that felt perfect for the outer cover. I felt suitable for the printing process for when I wanted to print the out cover, and was even suitable if I felt like I wanted to do inside sleeve artwork.