Click picture to enlarge!
I LOVE Harry Potter and i am not ashamed to admit it. So I decided to do a little comic about the things I remember about Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It turns out I remember quite a bit. Please feel free to leave me a comment, Tweet and share on Facebook and all that fun social stuff =)
Click on the pics to enlarge!
I think anyone who has played The Settlers online recently can relate to this little comic. There has been so many login issues that it has caused some people to leave the game for good. I think BB really need to sort it out otherwise they will lose a lot more players!
Can now be read for free at http://www.scribd.com/doc/83268860/The-Fat-Lazy-Bat
or just click the cover 
I am working on a YouTube ‘read along’ and slightly animated version of the book too. As it is FREE go check it out!
I can reveal my second EBook will be out really soon and it will be FREE!!!!
I have just uploaded it to Amazon, IBooks (Apple) and Barns and Noble. So once they all accept it then it will be live and you will be able to download it on whatever EBook device you have.
The Fat Lazy Bat is a rhyming story about a very fat and very lazy bat with a slight Dr. Seuss twist. The book will be completely free so you have no excuse not to download it.
Welcome to Part 2 of this tutorial. If you missed the first part click here to read that. In this part I will talk about how I made the files, Formatted and published the book.
MAKING THE FILE!
So after colouring the whole book (which was by far the longest part of the process) I moved on to making the book. I saved all the pages that I crated in Photoshop to jpgs. As I drew at double the size I needed I had to half the size and lowered the resolution to save on file size. Then I opened Adobe Acrobat Professional and followed these steps to make my PDF file.
Formatting
Click File/Create PDF/Merge Files into a Single PDF…
Click Add Files and Add Files again, Select the files (All of the pages/jpegs and click Add Files.
Make sure they are in the right order and click Combine Files.
Save the file as TheBookTitle.pdf
Make sure it looks how you want it to look and make sure no pages have decided to go in the wrong place
And that’s it! The PDF is ready to upload and sell.
Publishing the PDF book
PDF books can open in any pdf reader, I Pad, Kindle, etc. I decided to upload mine to Amazon (LINK!) I had to set up an account and follow the pretty easy instructions. I also took advantage of the 60 day lending program they have.
So at the moment I am only able to sell it there but in the future or if I opt out then I can sell it off my blog, webpage, etc. and use PayPal for all the money transfers.
ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE, ADVERTISE!!
This was the last and properly the most important step of all! If you don’t advertise then no one have any idea you have made a book. As I opted in for the Amazon lending then I got 5 day free advertising through Amazon. I used 4 of the days as soon as I uploaded the book. The only down side to this is that for those 5 day of advertising the book is listed for FREE. It wasn’t too bad though because it got the word out and people started downloading it and in fact at one point the book was ranked 259th out of ALL the free books on Amazon.com.
I also used my Facebook and Tumblr accounts to help spread the word. Luckily for me I have quite a few followers on Twitter thanks to my webcomic Geotrackes, So that defiantly helped too. Also The few people that had watched the making of the book via YouTube.
The end!
Thanks for reading this pretty long tutorial. I hope it was somewhat helpful to someone. Please check out Marty Ming-Mong and the Bully! and help spread the word via any means posible! Check back soon or follow me on Twitter to find out when the next blog entire will be. I think it will be the big reveal of my next EBook so look out for that.
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to make a Children’s picture book. So I sat down and drew up some sketches and some story ideas. The best idea that came out that day was ‘Marty Ming-Mong and the Bully!’ here is a pretty detailed blog about how I made and published a children’s EBook!
Programs and things I used!
First of all I wrote the story. I tried to keep it short but still have a beginning, middle and end. Also I wanted the book to have a kind of morale, which in my case was bulling. I tweaked and tweaked at the story for a couple of days until it was just the way I wanted and moved on to the layout stage.
In my sketchbook I drew out little thumbnail boxes to represent how many pages I wanted in the final EBook. As I had 13 pages of writing I knew I needed another 13 pages for the pictures and also a few extra for copyright info, tittle pages, etc. As I went with the words on one page and picture on the next page it was pretty easy to figure out what picture to draw. I had the whole book planed out in little thumbnail sketches and it was at this point I decided that I was going to blog and make some YouTube videos about the process and document how I figured stuff out for myself as it was the first time. This was my first YouTube video!
INKING!
Ok so in Photoshop CS5 I sketched out all the drawings of the book in a light blue and very loose. I did these at double the size of the final book and at 300 DPI. Just because I wanted to get a fair bit of detail and texture in the final art. Once I was happy with the placement, size, and look of the roughs I made a new layer and started inking. I use a hard edge, round brush at size15.
There’s not too many right and wrong ways to ink digitally, but I always have three main tips in mind whilst I ink.
1) Line thickness! Try and get good think and thin lines in your inking. The closer something is to you the thicker the line should be and for things more in the distance they should have thinner lines.
2) Follow through with your lines! If you want to get a nice smooth line you don’t want to keep stopping, so don’t! Draw the line you want in one smooth movement then erase the parts you don’t need or that overlap, that’s what the eraser is there for!
3) Take your time! There is no point in trying to rush. Just take your time and get it the way you want it. Like the old toy cleaner man in Toy Story 2 says ‘You can’t rush art!’
Colouring!
On a new layer UNDER the inking layer I started putting down my flats. Flats are just one colour fill to arrears of your picture that you want colour to be. The easiest way to do this is by using the ‘Bucket’ tool or just the plain brush tool to get the small areas that the bucket tool misses. Once all the flatting is complete I create another new layer above the ‘flatting’ layer but still below the ‘ink’ layer. I change my brush to one with a soft edge and set the opacity of the brush (not the layer!) to 20% and set the colour to something a bit darker then what you are covering over (i.e. the flat colour).
All I do after that is slowly build up the shadow by going over the same spot more then once as it gets darker and darker. A good tip for doing shadows is pick a side from where the light is coming from and put the shadow on the opposite side. Try to think of how much light that part would get and make it darker where there is less light and lighter where more light can get through. I also did this with the colour set to white, Just to add some high lights.
Sketch
Inks
Flats
Shadows
Check back for Part 2 of this tutorial on the making of the files, formatting and publishing the book!
