Illustrating Children's Books
How to make a front cover for your book
How to make a book - Lesson Plan 1
Although this is not a tutorial you can follow through step by step, because your art work will be totally different, plus your book will no doubt be a different size. It should however give you an insight on how to make a picture book, and the procedures required.
Step 1: After scanning your original art work into photoshop (or similar editing software) keep the original, save without reducing the resolution to much. Then open a new document to a size consistent with your final page size. Activate your original art-work and go to 'select all' 'copy' then 'paste' into your new document which should match your page size. Close your original art-work file, as you may need this for future projects. Now with the art-work in your new document reduce to fit page or area of the page you want to cover, if you are not sure how, see my tutorial'resizing images', butremember for an ebook or placing images on your website, they need to be in RGB mode and a resolution of 72. As this excercise is for print, you need to choose CMYK mode, with a resolution of 180 to 300 DPI (dots per inch).
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As you can see, by going to 'File' 'New' you get this dialogue box, I chose a resolution of 180 and the 'color mode' CMYK as this is for print. |
Step 2: My original collage, which was about 12 inches wide was far to big, so I took a section and resized it to about A4 size. You would resize to whatever your page size is going to be, or if you only want the image to cover part of the page, size accordingly. I then went to 'Image' 'Adjustment' - 'Desaturate', as my story was going to be in full colour after the story went on. Plus I wanted 'George', the main character to stand out in colour.
This is only a section of my collage, and the great thing about creating your own art work is that you can use and re-use again, in different ways, colours and sections of one piece of art.
Step 3: Next I opened a picture I had worked on from a photograph of my son George. I deleted all the background and increased his head to show off his cute expression even more, then saved as a png format. I then selected him by going to 'Select' then 'All' and copied and pasted him into my collage file it automatically creates a new layer. See below:-
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This is not that clear,but you can just see the two layers, showing the art work in the first layer and George in the second layer. |
By working in layers you can move things about, enlarge, reduce or change the colours, modes etc, in that layer, without disturbing the other layers.
Step 4: I then saved as a PSD (photoshop file) or you can save as a tiff or if using paint shop pro, use their default format, as you want to preserve the layers incase you need to edit later. Now go to 'Image' "Duplicate' to open a copy of your original file, click 'OK', then close down your original image, (incase you change something and save in error). Click on the copy to activate it and go to 'Layer' - 'flatten Image' then save as, in the format section, choose jpeg, another dialogue box pops up as follows:
| By moving the slider along you can choose from low to maximum, as this is for print and I want a good quality printed off, I chose Maximum. At the bottom you can see the size of the file, which is 308.2K. |
After saving your jpeg file you can discard the copy of your original, as this was just a safeguard to preserve your original file. The high quality jpeg is the file I will be using in my 'Page Layout' software. This is my version on 'How to make a book' front cover.
