Illustrating Children's Books
How to make a front cover for your book - Continued
How to make a book - Lesson Plan 2
If you have Adobe InDesign then this is all you will need. But for this tutorial and to get anyone new started, I am using a very reasonably priced page layout software, that I have found on the web. The link to purchase this software is the first image on the right, under 'Software Products'. If you are not a mac user then there are many other very reasonably priced page layout software available on the web.
Step 1: Open your page layout software, go to 'New' make sure 'Create Document from Scratch is highlighted, click OK. Now in the Document Setup dialogue box choose 'inches' under the page dimensions, enter your page sizes in the Width and Height, click OK.
|
Next go to 'File' 'Import Graphics' and choose the jpeg illustration you saved in the previous lesson. |
The cursor will change to this shape, 
place the cursor on the top left hand corner of the page, the size of your front cover image should match perfectly with the page size in the layout software. Now save with an appropriate name along with your other files.
Step 2: We are now going to add the title and authors name along with the illustrator, in an appropriate weight, colour and size font. In the tools pallete select the 'Text Box Tool' (6th tool down) which is the 'A' surrounded by a black outlined box. With your mouse drag across where you want to place your title, and a box will appear. See below:-
|
As you can see, by default it is a white box, and I want it to be transparent, so first select the solid black arrow tool (1st one), then go to 'Object' 'Fill Info' then check the 'Clear' radio button, click OK and the white box will become clear. |
Step 3: Now with the text box selected choose the 'A' tool (5th one down), and the cursor will flash in the box ready for you to type your title. My book is called 'Fentario' so after typing this in I need to enlarge the size. Once typed in drag the cursor across letters and go to the top, change the size, I changed mine from the default size of 12 to 80, then changed the font to 'Bookman Old Style'. I then highlighted the first letter 'F' as I wanted this to match a blue in his pyjamas. To change the colour go to 'Text' 'Color' then I chose the blue. You can be more specific and create your own shades to match precisely, with Adobe InDesign, which we could go into in a more advanced tutorial. I then drew another text box, for the name of the writer & Illustrator, it is best to do a seperate text box as the size will be a lot smaller, plus you have more flexibility to move around and place with precision. My name I chose a size of 17, because as you can see it fits in neatly with the width of the title.
I have left the outline of the text boxes to empasize the importance of seperate boxes for each title, plus it is a good idea to make the text boxes much larger than the text written, otherwise it is easy to get a letter or two chopped off and not realising until printed off. The outline of the boxes does not come out when printed. This is how I make my children's books.
