Memorial project: Tomorrow is Another Day

 

My friend Ralph had a long, maybe 10 year project, he worked on. It was a sequel to his favourite film, Gone with the Wind and he wanted to tell that story basically as a graphic novel or comic book and include as many old Hollywood stars from the film's era into his new story. They had to be around and available to David O Selznick when a second movie would have been made. He used the technique he used in making his renowned paper doll books, drawing out each page on letter sized paper, inking it and then making a copy of the cleaned up artwork to paint with watercolours. This had the extra step of typing out the dialogue for the thought balloons and then attaching them to the finished art before making colour photocopies to produce the final version of each page. 

Sadly my friend did not understand you can't sell a new story based on someone else's copyrighted work so this giant effort could never been professionally published and it was a huge disappointment for him. He showed its and pieces of the work to people but almost never the entire thing despite people, like me, begging him to. I wanted to scan the original art and put into a self published book using the company Blurb so he could see what it might have looked like as a "real"  book and even have copies made for his friends. That wasn't something I could get him to sign on to though. 

Now, after his passing his good friend Dan has spent a lot of time scanning a copies of the entire project he managed to get Ralph to give him so that i can fix it up and make that blurb book and a PDF version for his loved ones. 

This will take a LONG time. I did take the page I thought might be the most challenging and make it usable. I worked on the colour and straightening out the scan but the most difficult part was the text, especially the long list of movies stars listed. Some of the names were unreadable. So I removed all the text except the title by hand and recreated the art beneath it so as to have a clean image to put more readable text over. I hand typed the replacement text and researched names I could not read well to be reasonably sure they were the names Ralph wanted and then re-arranged the placement of them so the names could be a little larger and easier to read when printed. 

On top is the finished page so far and below is the original scan and the page after I removed the text. This isn't nearly the most interesting or exciting page in the book but I think it will be (I hope) the one needing the most work to prepare it for printing. I would have had a full age just for the names so they could be a decent size but this is as far from Ralph's original design I am willing to go. 

Book release/Sortie du livre: FLEXIBLE

 It has taken me a long while to put this together but it is finally for sale on Amazon! The limited amount of text is English and French. 72 pages in full colour.

The book is a compilation of illustrations of acrobats and athletes I have done over the years, some from a decade ago, some from the last month and are available as prints to anyone who is interested. The book is only 14.95$ USD and 18.88$ CAD. There is a Kindle version but it doesn't work as well in that format. 

My goal is to try and get my artwork out to the public and hopefully sell enough to help with my finances. That is not the most realistic plan, I know, but it's all have right now! 

If anyone out there would be kind and post about his on social media and tell anyone they think might be interested I would appreciate it. I am not on social media so it is fair to say I would not be successful doing that on my own. 

I need sales, but also reviews - they help a lot to get people interested in buying on Amazon. 

J'ai mis du temps à le mettre en place mais il est enfin en vente sur Amazon ! La quantité limitée de texte est en anglais et en français. 72 pages en couleurs.

Le livre est une compilation d'illustrations d'acrobates et d'athlètes que j'ai réalisées au fil des ans, certaines datant d'il y a dix ans, d'autres datant du mois dernier et sont disponibles sous forme d'impressions pour toute personne intéressée. Le livre est à seulement 14.95$ USD et 18.88$ CAD. Il existe une version Kindle mais elle ne fonctionne pas aussi bien dans ce format.

Mon objectif est d'essayer de faire connaître mes œuvres au public et, espérons-le, d'en vendre suffisamment pour m'aider à gérer mes finances. Ce n'est pas le plan le plus réaliste, je sais, mais c'est tout pour le moment !

Si quelqu'un était gentil et postait à propos de lui sur les réseaux sociaux et en parlait à tous ceux qui pourraient être intéressés, je l'apprécierais. Je ne suis pas sur les réseaux sociaux, il est donc juste de dire que je ne réussirais pas à le faire moi-même.

J'ai besoin de ventes, mais aussi d'avis - ils aident beaucoup à intéresser les gens à acheter sur Amazon.

Amazon Canada:

Amazon United States:

Professional work with Affinity Publisher

I stopped using Photoshop and Illustrator a few years ago and with the release this summer of Affinity Publisher, it is time to start replacing Indesign in my workflow as well.

I started slow, replacing some poster work which is always given to the printer as a PDF file and that went pretty easily. Next was transitioning the monthly invitations I do for a client to the 4 colour press we use. Normally I would package the Indesign project and send it out to them so moving to Publisher meant having to discuss options with them. It went much easier than I anticipated. I don't send them Publisher documents, they don't have the software... yet. We had to work together to figure out the best configuration for the PDF files. I should say that at first they were horrified, thinking I meant Microsoft Publisher which is NOT professional layout material, but after I sent them a link to the Serif software website, they were relieved I hadn't lost my mind and I had found something of professional quality.

Aside from exiting the aggravation and controversy of the Adobe subscription cloud fiasco, are there advantages to doing this? Yup, plenty. Even though Publisher is, in effect, a version 1.0 release in many ways - working with it has been very productive. There are features I would love to have implemented and many will, I'm sure, eventually - but missing features or not - my work is getting done much easier and faster. One huge advantage is the workspace, it's always in what Indesign would call full resolution mode. There isn't another mode and there doesn't need to be, Scrolling and zooming is fast and effortless and being able to see everything clearing and as it will look in the final print version. I like how fonts and text are handled much better, though it takes some getting used to after a couple decades of Indesign use. One of the biggest changes and improvements from my old workflow is how editing of exterior files works. Indesign lets you open Photoshop or Illustrator, make changes, then update the files in your document. Affinity Publisher has an all in one approach - you literally just press a button and you are in the photo or vector app, no need to reload and update or have another program taking up screen space. It's a very fluid way of working. Importing images is different as well, and now that I have a grasp on the basics, it's so simple and fast I can't imagine going back to the old ways.

Some of the problems I saw on the horizon have been resolved. Blurb, the online book publisher has a plugin directly for Indesign but not Publisher, making it harder to design and send a project to them. Today, however I discovered they have a PDF calculator and set up page so if you are not using the Adobe product, you can still prepare your work confidently. It is not as easy, but it is workable. I will be experimenting with that soon. Speaking of PDFs, one thing I did not think about was that by sending in only a finalized PDF, I can work 100% on Affinity format with images and illustrations, meaning I don't have to format them as TIF or EPS files for the printing process, making it super easy to make changes and saving more steps than I realized it would. *This would work with Indesign too if  I wasn't sending in a packaged project.

My just published book, Indifference, was trial an error making Kindle and print versions but formatting mistakes I made at first were quickly corrected and I am very happy with the results.

I guess the best part of this has been I was able to do it and my clients never even noticed the change. I look forward to the iPad version next year for those times I am away without use my laptop since the entire, fully functional Affinity suite will be on iPad and for now I can use Photo or Designer to edit multi page documents to a large extent already.

All and all I would say I made the right choice to switch both financially and artistically.