Page 34 Finished, with Dialog Bubbles

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Here’s page 34 at last. The dialog may change, but the painting is done…almost. In my reality, nothing is ever really finished. I just reach a point where I can’t make the picture any better, and that’s when I declare it finished.

Just when I utter the word “finished”, I look at this picture in a thumbnail view and I can instantly see that the shadow on Tuca’s left pant leg is out of control. I’ll take care of that on my next work day.

The bucket looks good, thanks to a texture brush I found in Krita.

Pages 4 and 5 with Text Bubbles

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Last night’s sleep was restless. I was dreading the task of doing my taxes. . Fortunately, all went as well as taxes can go. I will sleep better tonight.

This picture is a two-page spread populated with text bubbles. I’m trying to avoid the huge blunder I committed in the first two books…drawing the images with complete disregard for the text. This time I’m keeping all of the important content within the safe area margins. The margin lines won’t appear in the final pdf.

My Bedtime Reading

Pyramid, by David Macauley. It’s about how pyramids are built. All of the illustrations are meticulously crafted pen and ink works of amazing detail. .

Filling Text Bubbles with the Komica Slick Font

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Using the Komika Font available at https://www.1001fonts.com/komika-text-font.html

Using the Komika Font available at https://www.1001fonts.com/komika-text-font.html

I’m fussy about fonts. I’ve looked at lots of free fonts and found some good and lots of not so good fonts. I’ve tried to make fonts, but I didn’t have the incredible patience and persistence it takes to create a font with hundreds of characters. Fortunately, the Komika font is free and it’s good, and it has just the right tone for my book. I didn’t use a comic book font for my first children’s picture book because I wanted a font with lower case letters. But, lower case letters do not lend themselves to the compact text need for text bubbles. And so I’ve come to Komika, which is compact and has a great set of glyphs for multiple languages. I’ll be using Komika for the rest of the books in the Jimmy Jay series…for now, at least.

Completed the First Round of Text Bubbles

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In the middle of exporting 2.8GB files in Photoshop PSB format

Today I completed the text bubbles for my second book. This export is really the first draft. I’ll carefully inspect every bubble for typos and missing words before doing a final export to InDesign. I have to constantly double-check myself because I’ve always been an inaccurate typist. I once timed myself at 30 words a minute on a manual typewriter and that’s how fast I’ve stayed over the years. I am a miracle of consistency.

Black & White Text Print

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Text box 80% opacity.

Text box 80% opacity.

Pure white text bubbles look harsh and seem disconnected from my book’s images. To get a better effect, I set the textbox background opacity to 80% to give the feeling that the boxes are an organic part of the page rather than a sticker pasted on. With the textboxes at 80% opacity the pages have a holistic feel, but I wanted to see how they would look on the printed page. I printed the page above in black and white at 300dpi to get an idea of the levels. They look just right…in black and white, at least.

I’ve moved my Cintiq back to my Windows box and I’m happy now. Clip Studio Paint works better on Windows 10 than on macOS, at least with my gear. I can’t find anything on the Web about poor performance on Macs, so I’m thinking that it may be my Apple hardware that sucks.

Text Bubbles too Close to the Trim Line

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I moved another inch closer to the End today. I was double-checking the size of images — again — and, by accident, discovered that some text bubbles were running off the page, overflowing the trim line. Though I thought I had placed images and text boxes with mindful care, I really missed the mark. I’ve been looking at these pages for months without seeing that the text bubbles were too close to the page’s trim line…until I exported the book to a PDF and pored over each page pixel by pixel.

Here’s an example of what happens when I rely on the judgement of my eyeballs — on a single page there two text bubbles leaving the page and one in danger of becoming the third mistake if the trim line is shy by a millimeter or two. Three mistakes on a single page! Whoa!

bubble_too_close_to_cut_line_blog.png, text bubbles, cut line, InDesign

Mysterious artifacts in inDesign PDF export

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At every phase of this project there have been unexpected problems. Actually, all of my problems are unexpected because this is the first time I’ve every tried to create a picture book. In my mind, I thought I’d be finished four months ago. A seasoned pro would have experienced these growing pains enough times to be able to sidestep them and deal with bigger unanticipated problems, such as how to deal with movie deals, book tours, Internet fame, and how to invest all of the money that’s piling up in their bank accounts.

In the meantime, I’ve got to figure out how to get a clean export out of inDesign. I’m using a stroke on the text to create a bubbly text bubble, but there are some transparencies no matter how large I make the stroke. And, if a “y” is on the line above a tall character like a “d”, its descender is covered. I’ll have to tweak this some more tomorrow.