A Book Burning

The sweet satisfaction of yet another completed DMF project juxtaposed to the furious frenzy of looming finals leaves me with the twisted urge to liberate my heroes, to unleash them on an unsuspecting world, to let their ashes rain down upon the earth after a celebratory hempfire of their book debut.  Ganja Boy would approve.  The truth of the book, however, of Captain Ashland & Ganja Boy, would be much better disseminated through the book’s publishing, though the second half must be included first…hahaha, second, first.  Sometimes this writing is just too much fun.   Mamajuana (moi, that is, my character in one of the many Captain Ashland & Ganja Boy adventure sequels simmering on the cerebral stove) aims to do just that – to bring “Ganja Boy’s Big Plan” to its exciting conclusion during quarter break and to do the “finesse” step(s) to make the first book publishing ready.

The production schedule set out for this project was met, with the exception of being a day late with the first “dummy” as somehow I thought the 15^th  of this month was Tuesday, my lab day, and not Monday.  (ARGH!)   The pages were concept complete and ready for the “dummy”, but I, alas, had a momentary “dumb blonde lapse”.  This last week of production proved to be the most interesting as I worked through my plan of basically completing at least one page a day since the cover was already done.  IT WORKED!  Captain Ashland & Ganja Boy flew on schedule, 11/29/10.  That being said, I suspect there will be changes still coming as I add the second half of the story and finalize the lay out of the total work.

The space – time continuum traveled on route to completion was far less bumpy with the knowledge gained this quarter.  Indeed, prior to this quarter, I would not have been able to do this project at all.  Tools most commonly used were lots of different layer adjustments, painting, cutting, various selection devices, shape devices, texts, rasterizing, ayyiyi!  I can’t remember them all.  And that’s just Photoshop.  InDesign tools included frames, text wraps, object arrange, and more.  I can’t believe I know this much from just this quarter!  Admittedly, there is much more to learn, specifically about paths, channels and masks.

Thankfully, this knowledge enabled me to accomplish the layout and design that I feel works for my book.  My intention was to be somewhat like a comic book, but with more text, so I incorporated more text on certain pages while still trying to maintain a comic feel to the book as the story is completely playful and absurd.  The idea was to support the story visually with an affinity for comic graphics as opposed to just a book with pictures.   And so, I’m hoping my heroes are truly flying with this first installment of their adventures.