It’s frustrating at times, but I have to admit that I’m enjoying going back to basics with my printed booklets, doing a bit of detective work to see where the hold up in printing speed is creeping in. So far, so good: this ultra-simple booklet with placeholder text prints out in a couple of minutes and it makes no difference if I use GIF images or larger format TIFs, which are about twice the size.
It’s such a pleasure to construct a really simple booklet, dropping little rough sketches in wherever I please, that it makes me want to design another booklet for real, perhaps taking a sketchbook and scanning the illustrations separately then typing up my handwritten notes.
I’m using Adobe InDesign CC 2017, a program which seems to have its quirks if, like me, you’re more used to Microsoft Publisher or Serif PagePlus.
Image manipulation and booklet printing get me every time: I always grab the frame rather than the image itself when I want to change its size, but surely by now I’ve learnt that you don’t select ‘Print’ if you want to print a booklet!
I write my Wild Yorkshire nature diary for the Dalesman magazine five or six weeks ahead of publication so in the past week I’ve turned my attention to the October article, which really makes me feel as if summer is coming to a close!
Usually I have plenty of material to sift through but last October we’d only just got over selling my late mother’s house and we had so much on that Barbara and I managed only a book delivery excursion to the Peak District and a couple of days in Scarborough.
Moleskine sketchbook page, October 2015.
With such a short time on the coast, I tried to draw whenever I got the opportunity but that meant that I didn’t get around to writing many notes, certainly not enough for my 800 word Dalesman article.
Barbara’s notebook.
Luckily while I was perching on the sea wall at North Bay sketching rocks and birds, Barbara was sitting on a bench nearby writing in a pocket notebook, so I’ve filled in the blanks in my article from her observations.
It reminds me of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy: she wrote meticulous descriptions of the scenery and natural history that they’d encountered on their walks and he’d put them into verse, implying that he’d been wandering ‘lonely as a cloud’ (except for Dorothy following him and scribbling in her notebook).
Scrivener
In Scrivener you can rearrange the sections of the article you’re writing using a virtual corkboard.
I’ve got the chance to be more productive than Wordsworth: I don’t have to lie on my couch ‘in vacant or in pensive mood’ because I can get my ideas together using my favourite writing program Scrivener, which is set up so writers can drop rough drafts in, rearrange them on a virtual corkboard and then go into a full screen, distraction-free writing mode (that’ll be the day, when I don’t get distracted!).
Even so it took me a couple of sessions to polish up the article so that it flows but, even using Barbara’s notes, I’d only got to 500 words. Having set the scene on the coast I didn’t want to change the location to the Peak District or to our home patch to finish off the article.
Halcyon Days
As I drew last October I’d been amazed to see a kingfisher fishing in the sea, diving in from a concrete post, so I decided to write a little more about that. I looked up the kingfisher in Birds of the Western Palearctic but even in the twelve pages of closely written notes of this nine volume handbook I couldn’t spot a suitably fascinating fact that would draw my article to a close.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology weren’t all that helpful either but then I remembered my favourite study of the roots of classical mythology, The White Goddess by Robert Graves. I’ve still got the copy that I bought as a student. His explanation of the myth of the kingfisher mentions the account written by Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist, which I was able to track down via Google. Pliny describes the floating nest that kingfishers were believed to make at sea during the calm halcyon days of December:
“Their nests are truly wonderful; they are of the shape of a ball slightly elongated, have a very narrow mouth, and bear a strong resemblance to a large sponge. It has never yet been discovered of what material they are made; some persons think that they are formed of sharp fish-bones, as it is on fish that these birds live.”
That struck me as the perfect way to round off my article.
Back in mountain country and that lone plum tree looks familiar as I’m on a return visit to the first tutorial in Create 3D Like a Superhero; Chipp Walters’ introduction to the landscape design program Vue.
This is as far as I got with the high res render of the scene.
With tree, foreground and mountain in place, I try a full-screen test render. After half an hour my computer estimates that it will take another 27 hours to complete the image! Luckily smaller images take just a few minutes to process. If I ever need a larger image, I’ll leave it rendering overnight.
The clear blue sky is the default atmosphere but you can load alternatives, such as a ‘Lead & Gold’ sunset.
Chipp Walters points out that awkward transitions between objects can create an unreal point of focus in the landscape, so I experiment by introducing a cloud, which I scale down and drop into the valley to try and give the effect of rising mist. It looks more like a giant sheep.
I really don’t know clouds at all. But I’ll only learn by playing around with the program.
Links:Cornucopia 3D where you can download a full version of Vue Pioneer (the only limitation is that it stamps ‘Created in Vue’ on every render)
This isn’t an actual title that I’m working on. I’ve pasted existing artwork and roughs into a booklet template.
This looks like a real life booklet but it’s actually a 3D mock-up generated in BookViewer, a feature included in the comic book program Manga Studio EX5 (but not available in the standard version of the program, Manga Studio 5). That’s going to be so useful to me. You can scroll through your virtual publication and tilt it to almost any angle.
I’ve made the most of a rainy weekend to explore the booklet producing capabilities of the program. As far as I can tell, you can’t easily print a booklet using Manga Studio, so I’m also reading up on the booklet design and printing capabilities of Adobe InDesign, which is specifically designed to paginate and print booklets, plus a whole lot more, of course. I’ll export the individual pages of the booklet as Photoshop image files from Manga Studio then paste them individually onto the page templates in InDesign.
Pencil and Paper
I can get so far with the manuals, online help and video tutorials but to understand what the finished booklet would look like I’ve gone back to pencil, paper and ruler.
I’m printing at home on A4 paper but, like most printers, my Oki colour HD printer and my everyday HP Laserjet don’t print right to the edges of the paper, so I need to allow a 5 millimetre margin all around.
Bleed Area
I want to allow the artwork to bleed off the edges of the page so I’m allowing for a 3 millimetre bleed along the outside edges. Even so, I don’t want the text or anything else vital to the design of the booklet to go right to the edge of the page, so I’m keeping my main design area 10 millimetres in from the edges of the page and from the gutter.
Link; YouTube video Fanzine Export, Manga Studio Guide Episode 14 by Doug Hills.
Lunch time sketch (actual size two inches across) at the Seed Room, Overton; pan-fried hake, beetroot, mouli, radish with watercress in yogurt dressing.
What should be something that I can do in minutes takes an hour or two of head-scratching. I’m trying to put circles within circles to create a badge (or button as the American’s would call it). So simple but there are three programs that I could use to do it and several alternative methods within those programs.
When even Google and You Tube can’t give you the specific information you’re after, there’s only one thing to do; phone a friend. In this case John Welding, comic artist and veteran Photoshopper is the man to call. In half an hour of patient explanation he gets me on the right track.
Full screen distraction-free writing in Scrivener.
I like to keep things as simple as possible, which why I’ve pared down the pens and watercolours in my art bag to the bare minimum. It’s the same with writing. You might assume that pen and paper would be the ultimate in simplicity but if you’re like me and you go over and over your text trying to make it clearer and more succinct you can end up with an almost illegible mess of crossings out and rewrites.
Notes written while researching my ‘Walks around Ossett’ booklet.
Of course I’m talking about writing for books and magazines here; this online diary has to be more rough and ready!
Corkboard
Corkboard view in Scrivener
My favourite program for distraction-free writing is Scrivener, from Literature and Latte, the people behind the Scapple mind-mapping program that I was using yesterday. Scrivener enables you to bring together your research and rough drafts. A useful option is the corkboard with post-it notes representing each section. You can easily rearrange them to improve the flow of your story.
This morning I’ve got my Onward Christian Soldiers Scapple mind-map propped up in front of my iMac and I’m writing a rough draft of each of the aspects of the story. I’m in distraction-free mode because I don’t want to get bogged down with my research. I’ll come back to that later when I’ve got the flow of the story established. If I can’t get readers hooked, all those names, dates and places won’t be of much interest anyway.
Over the last month I’ve occasionally updated friends on how I’m getting on with my article – the equivalent of an elevator pitch – and I find myself going back to certain vivid anecdotes. It’s a good test that if I find a story interesting, my Dalesman readers will probably find it interesting too.
Links
Scrivener is described by Literature and Latte as ‘your complete writing studio’ but it’s worth going for Scapple too you’re doing a lot of research and brainstorming.
I’m fascinated by 3D programs. My favourite is Vue because of the way it handles natural landscapes but whenever there’s an update, I’ll have another experiment with SketchUp, which is more of a 3D design tool for buildings, furniture and so on. So this morning when I received an e-mail from E-on telling me that there’s now a program, LumenRT, that allows you to export your SketchUp designs into a photo-realistic 3D environment, I had to give it a go.
My design in SketchUpMake
But how easy would it be? In a minute or so I extruded a rectangular block in SketchUp and punched a few holes in it to make it look like some kind of building then I pressed the ‘export to LumenRT’ button. At first there was a glitch as my mouse had become disabled but on restarting my iMac the export worked perfectly. Like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz, my model had dropped into another world, although this one does look rather like Kansas (during the Dust Bowl). I was able to approach move around the model in real time (no lengthy waiting for it to redraw) using the mouse.
The man (I think he’s one of the guys who dreamed up SketchUp) is a 2D figure who appears when you open a new SketchUp project, to give you an idea of the scale.
Links; Both programs currently offer free downloads for non-commercial use, although Lumen RT and recent free versions of Vue insist on adding a small logo to any image that you export.
LumenRT ‘Quickly create images, videos and real-time presentations of Architecture, Landscape, Urban and Infrastructure Designs’. Warning, there does seem to be some kind of bug which disables the mouse on an iMac, so be careful that you don’t have any vital unsaved work open in other programs as you might have to restart.
When I folded and trimmed this version, I realised that my 9 should be a 6!
Here’s an idea for a pocket-sized booklet that you can make from a single sheet of A4 paper. It’s included in Christian Deakin’s Designing a Newsletter, subtitled ‘The really, really, really easy step-by-step guide for absolute beginners of all ages’.
Correct pagination, sketched from the diagram in Designing a Newsletter.
He gives it as an example of pagination but it appealed to me as a format that I could find a use for. Perhaps simply popping a series of related sketches into a sequence.
Or, if you couldn’t quite get started on your first novel, you could pop in some linked text boxes and write a really, really, really short story.
In Design
I’m gradually getting myself back into booklet producing mode so I’ve taken this as an opportunity to become more familiar with Adobe InDesign, adjusting margins and guides and adding a non-printing guide layer.
I noticed that when printing in duplex mode on my HP Laserjet that in the printer options I need to set ‘Layout’ to ‘Two-Sided; Short-Edge Binding’, otherwise one side of the sheet doesn’t tally with the other.
Laser printers aren’t designed for millimetre perfect registration and, although I could probably tweak my guide boxes to allow for the thickness of the folded paper, I think the best thing to do will be to allow a generous margin of error around the content of each page.
We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks dealing with series of unfortunate events, running around to get repairs to a wall, a ceiling, a 1930s jug handle and the dented rear end of our car.
So it’s wonderful to get back to my desk and – as a complete indulgence – to re-familiarise myself with my computer, I’ve been going through some of the obscurer workings of my web design program, Dreamweaver.
Absolute Positioning
For instance what on earth is AP Div? Absolute Positioning, which is what the AP stands for, sounds really useful, but a short tutorial from Teach Yourself Visually Dreamweaver convinces me that it would be best avoided.
I played around with the possibilities by scanning three sketches of objects on my desktop then dropped the scanned images into AP Div boxes in Dreamweaver and moved them about so that they overlapped, then changed the stacking order.
It worked but, looking at the uploaded web page, I soon realised that when I maximised the size of my browser window they got totally out of sync with the rest of the page. Not recommended!
I’m using Adobe InDesign CC 2017, a program which seems to have its quirks if, like me, you’re more used to Microsoft Publisher or Serif PagePlus.
For instance what on earth is AP Div? Absolute Positioning, which is what the AP stands for, sounds really useful, but a short tutorial from Teach Yourself Visually Dreamweaver convinces me that it would be best avoided.