Hi Everyone,

Today I’m going to write a post showing the process I used to make the images for “The Alphabet of Perilous Encounters“.

This project didn’t start with a book in mind.  I was just having fun drawing silly pictures for my son.  Since I wanted to share some of the images with my family, I took a picture of the source (which in this case was off a dry-erase board) on my iPhone.

This went on for quite a while.  At some point I realized this might make for a good, slightly off-humor, book for children.  So once I had drawn and photographed all the images needed for the book, the next step was to take them into Adobe Flash and trace them.  Why Adobe Flash?  I like the way that program creates very clean sharp lines that have some variation and depth to them.  It kind of looks like ink drawings.  I’m sure this can be done in Photoshop, or several other programs, but I’ve been using Flash as a drawing tool for so long I don’t even think about it.  So the next step leads to a clean black line image with a transparent background…

 

Now the new image in loaded into Photoshop.  At this point I simply created layers underneath the original image and colored in each section as I saw fit.  I also added a texture layer to give the whole thing… well, to give it texture.

The last step was to type in the words.  For the paper back I wrote the words directly within each photoshop file.  For the iBooks version, the words were added in later using iBooks Author.

All the images were saved separately and complied into the final book using either In Design for the paperback, or iBook Author for the (no surprise) iBooks edition.

That’s all there is to it.  If I had been planning a book from the start I still probably would have drawn the image in flash before exporting them to photoshop.  The point, in this case, is that any medium can be the starting point for your picture book – even underexposed, blurry, iPhone photos!

Thanks for reading!