07 April 2022

Book Design: The Blinkers and the Bolgers by Jimmy Cinnamon & Frank Nagorka




 I recently was given the job to design a children's book from original illustrations drawn by the authors when they were about 10 years old. I was given a PDF of an earlier version that have been printed at a copy store and spiral bound. It had also been modified by someone else earlier with photoshop, adding some colour to the backgrounds. As it was drawn on letter sized paper and the printing of book on Amazon did not provide that format, all the illustration ad to be cleaned up and reformatted to fit a square page. 

To accomplish a clean professional look, I had to separate the original illustrations from the background, paper and added photoshop elements, including the hand written text. I used quite a few techniques to do this which takes some time, but it was worth since I could then reposition all the elements to fit on the square pages. I was asked to punch up the colours  as well since the copy store version had dulled the crayon colours. 

Another challenge was that some of the drawings went off the edge of the page so I had to extend and add to them so they would look complete on the page. 

The book can be bought on Amazon. 


2 comments:

T' said...

Wow, this looks like it was a really tough job! Keeping the feel of the original but sprucing it up as well. I think you did a great job from what I can see here. Well done and really cool to bring back an old, childhood project like that.

Behemoth media said...

I really was alot of work but I like doing it. I really wanted it to look as professional as possible considering it was done by 10 year olds since it was a passion project for the guy who hired me. He liked my book, Flexible" he saw at a mutual friend's house and that gave him the idea to hire me.