OUIL405 Visual Narratives SB2 - A Book of...Production and Final Print

This is what the final pages look like - laid out to print. I think it ended up working really nicely!! I was worried the interior colours wouldn't work with the colours on the front/back pages but it ended up blending together pretty seamlessly. Print was fairly stress free - I added a 3ml bleed margin when putting it together in photoshop, then trimmed it down and folded it to form the final book

This is what the end result looks like.

As a finishing touch, I added the coffee-cup sash because I found that because of the thickness of the stock, the book didn't fold 'flat' and it looks a bit unprofessional. I think if I re-made that i'd write my name on it a bit better because it looks really...strangely aligned. But the printed book itself came out better than i'd really hoped for. I think managing my time and not trying to bite off more than I could feasibly chew has lead to me being able to create something really refined and finalised, which is a real turning point in my work. 

OUIL405 Visual Narratives SB2 - A Book of...Visual Development continued/Production

This was the first digital run of the front page that I did. I really didn't like how this looked - the colour scheme was really flat and didn't really go together right and the linework looked really stiff and boring. The biggest problem I found with working digitally was that it it was very easy to make your work look really clinical and dull - but it was also a fine line between 'visually interesting' and 'really messy'. 

Here I tried to unify the colour scheme a little better by changing the saturation, but It still didn't really work all that great. I eventually scrapped this.  

At this point I tried out a colour scheme using a family of colours that were all really close to each other (In a similar manner to Luke Pearson) - which started to turn out a lot better! I still wasn't happy with the line work on the cup so I scrapped this version again and went on to do another, but I felt like it definitely started to go somewhere  

This was the third version I created, which is the version I eventually went on to use as a final. Whilst I preferred the colour scheme on this I thought it was a bit too saturated and the hue was slightly off so I fixed that. I think the bigger, bolder title for this looks much better as well.

I used the colour scheme for the two respective front covers to use on the back pages.

A lot of the problem I had with the interior was regards to how exactly I could make two sides - though subtly different, still have a similar sort of scheme without having to completely redo the whole page - considering I'd used both yellow and blue in side 1. What was pretty cool was that I could simply edit the pre-existing line work to make them look a lot more haggard - the colour scheme was slightly more of a difficult affair. The solution was somewhat accidental but not only saved me time, kept consistency without having to pick an entirely different colour scheme manually - I toggled with the hue and saturation until I got something slightly duller, but still colourful enough to work in cohesion with the pages on the first side.

This method of work was not only efficient, it meant that I could ensure that the pages remained at a constant level of refinement throughout, as opposed to having some pages looking ~extra nice~ and others looking a bit more rushed. 

The choice to leave the figures white came again from experimentation. I had begun to colour in and add shadows and highlights to the characters, but I found they ended up sinking into to background and not really standing out much - the lines were detailed enough to make them work without any colour, so I eventually ended up choosing to leave it out for all of them. I think it ended up working very well.

OUIL405 Visual Narratives SB - A Book of...Visual development

Content wise, I pretty much knew what I wanted to put in the book and roughly what layout and composition I wanted for each page. The largest problem was I had no idea what exactly I wanted it to look like. Most of the sketches i'd done were in fineliner, but I knew from doing the mock-up that I didn't want to use that for the final book as it was particularly sloppy and time-consuming to refine

 

in order to test the widest range of media in the quickest possible manner, I did a series of these little character studies. There was a lot of promise in a lot of them, I really liked the rough line quality that coloured pencil gives and thats probably something i'll definitely use again. I'd never used ink in this manner either, and I was really pleased with the colours that I managed to get out of it - much brighter and saturated than watercolours tend to be! These also tipped me off to the idea of using two seperate colour schemes for both sides of the pages. 

(It later turned out that the double-sided printer would only take two types of stock, so I couldn't use the stock I originally planned to use, but it worked out for the better in the end as the matte white paper made it all look a lot cleaner)

These are thumbs for the front and back covers of the book. I wanted these to look definitively like the 'ends' of the book whilst still continuing the narrative that runs inside it. This is something I eventually managed to solve using the colour schemes I worked with.

Whilst I liked a lot of the outcomes of the analogous tests I did my main focus for the book was something that would produce the best, most refined outcome given the timescale I had to make it - which I felt would be difficult to achieve given the amount of refining and cleaning up I would have to do with analogously created pages.

Around this time I started looking really into Luke Pearson's limited colour comic pages, something which I though could potentially really benefit my own pages as it could help separate the two halves of the narrative whilst still keeping it feeling like it it was part of the same thing - as opposed to just doing one side in colour and one side in greyscale. 

I was also interested in the way he produced the line work for his work, considering he works heavily with ink and brush/brush nib pens. I lack a high quality ink brush pen, but I do have some nice quality ink and some brushes, so I decided to play about with some mock front covers using it.

The plan for these was to do the inks analogously and then colour it digitally. Again, I got pleasant results from the ink and I think with a bit more practice this technique would be something I would definitely look at using for more of my work. However I figured due to the time constraints I had, It would be quicker simply to do the pages entirely digitally, as I wouldn't have to continuously rock back and forth between sketchbook and photoshop.  

OUIL405 Visual Narratives SB2 - A Book of... Interim Concept Crit & Development continued

Feedback from the interim concept crit was positive and everyone seemed to understand and like my concept. Largely the only thing that got flagged up was my lack of visual/aesthetic experimentation, which is something I already knew I was due to do. Personally I was pretty happy with the progress I'd made at this point of with deadlines quickly looming I knew I had to start looking at the finalisation of ideas as well as just constantly drafting up new ones

These are the mock-ups I brought into the crit with me. This plan is for a double sided hot dog book, with one side demonstrating the way people work whilst consuming caffeine and one way showing them without. These scenarios are based on a mix of personal observations made from being on the go and also from the research compiled at the start of the brief in SB1. My main reasoning behind choosing this format was that I wanted something that was going to be relatively stress free when it came to production, giving me time to really focus on the quality of the illustration that goes into it - plus capping it at 16 pages means that although it is the minimum amount of pages required, it'll give me chance to work on something that is really nicely refined - a failing point in a lot of the work I turned in last module for Visual Skills (though I will have to reconsider the front and back pages in order to make them more illustrative) . I think toning down my idea and stripping it of its surreal superpower themes was a good choice, because I think its now a lot more clear and consise and more people are likely to understand it a bit better when they read it. 

From this point onwards I now want to start focusing on what media I'm going to do the final book in, and work out roughly what sort of method is going to suit the narrative and the concept of the book best.

OUIL405 Visual Narratives SB2 - A book of....Bookbinding Workshops

Because the eventual format of these narratives will be compiled into books, we took a workshop in order to gain a better understanding of the different ways we could use binding to add another dimension to the work we're doing (as well as to present it neatly)

Here are rough diagrams of all the binds we've learnt over the workshops that we've done.

Japanese Stitch Bind

Japanese stitched-binds are held together with stitching along one left hand side of all the pages. This bind is ideal if you have a lot of loose pages, or if you're using analogue artwork right off the bat for your book. The only thing you have to consider for this is that you need to leave an adequate margin in order to ensure that none of the content on your pages is lost when you sew it together. It's possible to do double page spreads with it, but a lot of planning has to go into exactly what info goes on which side to make sure it's assembled correctly (Indesign can help with this, however the document needs to be set up for individual pages as opposed to double page spreads)

Saddle-stitch Bind

Also known as a 'pamphlet bind', this is probably the easiest of all the binds because you literally sew down the centre of the book to create a neat, conventionally folded book. Fully bounded books - the sort bought on bookshelves everywhere are typically made using lots of these sewn together. In order to get the content correctly orientated for these books you ideally need to use indesign to lay out the pages in order to print it all. 

Concertina Bind

Incorrectly labelled as 'Pamphlet bind' in my diagrams above (oops) - Concertina books are ideally bound using folded sheets glued back-to-back. Concertina books arguably have the most room for experimentation, giving their rather free-flow bind - you can have one long illustration that runs the entire length of the book, or you can use each page as a standard and then run on to the reverse side as well.

The only downside that comes with all this playfulness is that it's also probably the bind with the biggest room for error. Unlike thread which is a relatively risk free binding material, glue is incredibly unpredictable. It often takes a bit of practice getting to know exactly how much glue you need to keep it all stuck together without it becoming a gluey mess. This is a risk regardless of whether or not you choose to draw straight into it or print it; if you print it you need to make sure you don't get glue on the final work, and if you draw straight into it you need to makes sure you don't mess the surface up with the glue whilst you're assembling it. 

Hot Dog Books

Hot dog books are called such because they fold in a in a manner that looks a little bit like a hot dog. Hot dog books are typically formed from one sheet of paper, folded down into little booklets that can be opened up, reversed and refolded to create another book (or one big poster/illustration, the possibilities are pretty much endless). They're quite popular amongst comic artists because you can make them very cheaply (with it literally being a one-sheet process) and they can also be made very quickly. 

Due to the basic nature of their format - a lot of the layout can be done manually over two documents in photoshop as opposed to setting up an indesign document for it. They're very low maintenance and they don't require much in terms of planning so long as you know exactly where each page is going to sit. The few downsides to hot dog books however is that they can sometimes look a bit scruffy and low-fi depending on how they're presented. Also, if you choose to do a double-sided book, people unfamiliar with how hot dog books work may find it difficult to read them.