'Tell an untold Story' - The Visual Journalist PT4

Feed back from our recent peer review - agreed with it on the whole but had some positive comments regarding the theme of the book. Maybe i'd been a bit too hard on myself.

Some production experiments. Initially i wanted to experiment with acrylic or maybe gouache to achieve blocks of solid colour. I produced my black linework then using a light box produced another sperate layer for just the colour, like you would when screen printing. Hopefully the brush marks on the paint could be seen, giving the sense that it had been done by hand, (which it had). I'd then scan in both linework and the painted colours into Photoshop and match them up.

Digital colouring (left) and scanned acrylic layer (right)

Assessing both results, and taking into account how much longer creating the real painted layer took compared to the digital painting, and seeing how their wasn't a huge difference i opted to colour the rest of the pages in digitally. Time was also getting tight and i hadn't spent a lot of time considering layout or page order, so i decided to paint some patches  of acrylic onto paper and scan that in hi-res and use it for the backdrops.

My book layout would be pretty straight forward. 20cm X 20cm pages, cleanly stapled. I had considered saddle stitching, but felt it didn't really suit the content type. I wanted it to be sturdy and 'brochure-eqsue' you could say,without making it sound boring.

Production process for the final book images- 

from development sketch, to digital to final outcome. 

Some example of other finished pages,ready for print,layout below.

The print layout of the book was something i was worrying massively about, however a very useful chat with Mike (Flower) put my mind at rest, as i was told i didn't have to worry about working out which pages were going to be on the flip-side of each other, or if they had to be printed upside down etc etc… InDesign takes care of it all! That was a massive relief as the deadline was dangerously near.