A page from Color Me with Kat McD. |
I've been diligently working on creating an adult coloring book through Createspace with Amazon. The process was a bit of a learning curve, but I'm so happy with the results. Always looking to re-purpose artwork and with the piles of my Day of the Dead line drawings growing, the adult coloring book craze could not have been a better fit.
Here is what I had to learn:
- How to clean my artwork very well in Photoshop
- How to increase the stroke size for the line work
- How to save files to PDF -
- How to design a cover with the help of great artist friends
Here is how I did it ~ for Createspace in Photoshop
Scan/Clean
Scan interior art at high res 1200 dpi, grayscale. Clean with magic wand, erasure tool - delete all
the white .
Stroke
Select white, inverse to the black lines and go to stroke, add 1 or 2 pixels
Interior
I used MS Publishing Layout. Keep in mind your gutters and bleed. I kept all odd pages blank so that markers won't bleed into images next page. insert each image to new page.
PDF - on mac MS
Save cleaned Photoshop files as tiff, then change dpi, Save As 300 dpi png
This was the most frustrating part to figure out. To Save this interior file as a PDF, go to PRINT and click on the button left labeled PDF. Here you can save as a PDF.
Cover
Design your cover so that it is clear when viewed as a thumbnail.
Create a template that includes bleeds and page count. Get friends to critique it.
I hope this helps those of you who are working on publishing your artwork into a coloring book.
I just got my proof and love the quality.