Lethbridge (Imaginary Friend)

I created both digital and hardcopy illustrations for my book, Lethbridge (Imaginary Friend). First I made a hardcopy prototype, then I took a photo on my phone of the illustrations and digitally painted them to the size I wanted the book to be. Then I made a book and got it printed online. Then I re-used a lot of my art to make other things, including a second book.

I used acrylic paint and I like thick watercolour paper for the hardcopy version, and I used an iPad with Pencil and ArtRage for a "painted-look" digitally, then on my laptop, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher to put the book together. You can see the finished book being read on YouTube.

First I have an idea and write out a rough story. Then I get some scraps of paper, really tiny, and fold them up like the pages of a book. I write the page numbers on the paper and mark on each page what is going on it, eg words or pictures. For a children's book I try and make it 32 pages as this is standard for a picture book. I break up the story to fit on the pages of text, then I think up some pictures that would work for each page of text. Pictured is an example of how I broke up the words and the illustrations that went with them.

Choosing the colours is so much fun. I did do my paintings as hard copy, but then I did them digitally with ArtRage. The cool thing about ArtRage is you can use any style of paint, I chose acrylic because that's what I used for my practice book, but you can also do it in crayons, coloured pencils, pens, brushes, watercolours, even airbrush and it looks pretty cool. Also, you can use the exact colours you choose from your colour palette.

I also made some "assets" in Affinity Designer so that I could repeat them for all the different bits of the patterns - that was a timesaver. I actually also made some real fabrics out of the patterns in the book. I made some lettering and little pictures I could reuse - it was fun coming up with the ideas. I made a font with glyphs mini (which is what you can write on with your keyboard) and an alpha-set of the script writing (which are little scaleable vector graphics that you can place on a picture and change the angle, size, thickness etc). For the alpha-set here, you can see there are lots of different kinds of the same letters, eg a, e, i, m etc so it looks handmade. (I can reuse these alpha-sets and fonts in other places.)

This step is so much fun! I used Affinity Publisher to lay out the book. The size I used is 8.5" and the book is square. I originally wanted it to be landscape but for some reason I could not find that shape as an option to print.

I did the cover in ArtRage for the illustrations, then set them up as back and front pages in Affinity Designer.

You don't have to sell your book, you might just want to give a copy to your parents and best friends. You can get it printed online in lots of places, including Amazon (although I found Ingram Spark has greater quality). It's cheap to get your own copies as you get the author's discount. To upload it, it has to be a pdf for the book and a pdf for the cover.

I re-used my idea to make another book called "Lethbridge at Home, Designing interior art and surface patterns for picture books". It's about how I used the artwork I designed in Lethbridge (Imaginary Friend) and why I drew the pictures that way and chose the colours - in the illustrations, it also has lots of the fabrics I turned the patterns into and I used the font and alpha-set on the cover too. This book is now finished and I'm just in the process of uploading and publishing it today. So you can draw one picture and use lots of the bits in the pictures in other things. Even the things that you might not like can get re-used somehow, or you can use small bits of art and make it something different.