Creating an Image Usable for Both Print and Ebook

My ongoing dilemma is that my print book will be in a square format and the ebook will be in either a 16:9 aspect ratio (HD) or a 4:3 aspect ratio (iPad). In short, I need two versions of each image. I didn’t plan for dealing with screen aspect ratios when I started this book. I was impatient to get all of my images painted and just plowed ahead without thinking.

My solution for this dilemma, for this book at least, is to produce square images that can be cropped to work in either the iPad or HD format. I plan to crop the square image into a wide image suitable for an ebook.

The example below shows a typical square image. Notice that there’s a lot of headroom that contains no important content. I’ll place the text boxes in that space. In the cropped ebook version, I’ll place the text on the left side of the image, or the right side, depending on the placement of the action. I will have to make sure that no important characters or action is covered by the text.

Here’s the square version of everyone getting on the Magic Moustache Bus. As I said, there’s a lot of blue sky in this image.

With the sky cropped, we have the wide ebook version.

Here’s what the original image looked like. When I drew this image I the bus became so large that it didn’t fit on the page. The new version shows the entire bus.

Getting the hang of inDesign one cell at a time

I got off my day gig a little early and expected to have some extra time for my book, but it turns out that my hustling actually created more stress than usual. It took me an hour to recover. I ended up unwinding with a cup of Peets decaf while I watched my partner brew up some Hippocrates soup. The only things missing from her soup was eye of newt and whisker of witch. It smelled good, but I didn’t have a drop. I do intermittent fasting and eat only during the period of 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., five hours a day. That means fasting for 19 hours a day. It ain’t fun but it keeps my glucose levels in the normal zone.

By 7 PM I had recuperated and got back to inDesign and put more text and images into my project. It helps to layout the book — I can see what’s working and see what needs more work. Seeing all of the thumbnails spread out feels really good. I know that I’m getting somewhere.

Here are some of some the lessons I’ve learned so far while doing this project.

• Before you start drawing and painting, decide on the layout. Will it be portrait or landscape?

• Once youve determined the layout, allow for two sizes of images, one for full page coverage and another for partial coverage, a squarer image perhaps. The images should allow space for text.

• Use the same color palette for all images. This may be obvious, but I didn’t do it. I’m feeling the pain now as I see that most of the coloring is inconsistent. If I want these images to be consistent (I do), I’m facing hours of repainting.

• Try to draw the characters pretty much the same every time. My characters look like teenagers in some scenes and look like children in others. For my next project I’m going to create a reference set of character poses that I can use from beginning to end.

Here’s a shot of the thumbnails in inDesign.

A Mockup of the Cover of My Children's Book

At last I’m getting something going with inDesign and Kindle Create. For this example cover I placed the text and image into the inDesign document, exported the project as a 32-page PDF (most of the pages are blank at this point), opened the PDF with Kindle Create, created a new comic, and got a preview…all without reading a word of documentation. Really, I’m one of those people who starts pushing the big red buttons and waits to see what will happen.

InDesign has some similarities ot Illustrator — lots of objects to move around and panels to adjust text and leading. I going to do some work with many of the images to make sure they look good with the landscape format. The layout will be fixed, which means that reader’s won’t be able to change the text size.

Moving on to Creating an EPUB book

I spent the evening searching for a quick tutorial on creating an epub children’s book, and found that it’s not as simple as I thought it would be. My original plan was to take a few hours to learn inDesign and then use it to lay out my words and pictures. To my surprise, inDesign is a beast of a program with steep learning curve. After I learned that inDesign is no pushover, I also learned that the standard way to create epub books is to lay them out it MS Word, which I despise, and don’t own a copy of.

Heading over to the IngramSpark site, I read that in order to publish my ebook with them, I need to have the ebook already created. I see that this is all spiraling back to creating the ebook, which I currently don’t know how to do. This calls for more research, fast. My plan is to look for tutorials on Youtube, then Skillshare, then god knows where. Fast.

And now, time has run out again. Looking at the clock on the wall, I see that my after-hours art hours have expired and I’ve accomplished not even an inch of progress. I’m bogged down in another learning curve, or two, or three.

I’m going to take 10 deep breathes and count my blessings. For one, I have a great job that pays the bills. I have a partner who is the light of my life. I have two dear souls, canine, whom I adore. We live together in a cozy house and I work at home with my loved ones. When I look at my life that way, I feel that tomorrow will bring new insights, and maybe new solutions, but I’m certain that it will bring good times.

There’s no book-related picture today, so I’m throwing a doodle into pot. I used my Pilot Frixion erasable gel pens for these. I love the feel of a juicy gel pen.