Artemis Draws

It certainly took a while but I’ve done it at last – got all my scans redone (which was painstaking!) and put into separate PDF files. Not exactly the size I had originally envisaged, but it turns out that all my comic pages actually fit nicely onto A4 paper and the text isn’t too small to be unreadable. I purchased Apple’s latest Pages software in order to get a simple layout manager to make up this little book when I decided that InDesign was much too expensive and probably overkill for my relatively simple needs. There are 5 stories so far and 73 pages in total, so I am mulling over the idea of writing and drawing 1-2 more stories to pad out the final book. I’d like my first book to be about 100 pages in length. When printed on double-sided paper, that will still merely feel like a slim volume in one’s hand.

I went to this little printers in Covent Garden (http://www.fastflowonline.co.uk), at 10p per side, it wasn’t too unreasonable at all and they bound the little book for me too, all for less than 10 quid. The printing quality wasn’t superb and the paper they used was cheap photocopier paper, but one can’t complain too much about a proof copy! In fact it was a joy to hold my work in my hands as a completed book, and the stories were far easier and more enjoyable to read in a printed format too – it was too tricky to get many people to read whole stories on the web. But at nearly 10 quid per copy, it’s still too expensive for me to be running off copies for friends. My new Epson Stylus printer at home still can’t cope with printing this without a blueish cast, even on a b+w setting.

At any rate, I will have to start hobnobbing around, searching for ways to get published, or self-published even – if it comes to that.

Note to oneself: I rewrote some of the dialogue of The Cafe Terrace and used the Ashcan BB font instead of the original Chalkduster. Just in case I need to remember this for the future….!