This can be very helpful for both plotting/pacing your work and print production. It allows you to see, for example, whether something will start on left hand or right hand page, or where a spread will fall – whether the spread is actually running across one sheet of paper, or if it’s being split up across two and there’s a chance for some misalignment. You can also have a sense of how long or short of a book you want (depending on your time/patience/budget etc.), and fill pages accordingly.

Coming from a professional and personal background where I’ve been involved in drawing, writing, design/layout, and print production, it’s hard for me to not think about how every step of a process affects the final piece (I sometimes dream and think about formats and papers even before I’ve finalized the idea of a story!).

When you are planning the content of a book, you could start like this:

1. Cover:
2. Pg 1: stuff happens
3. Pg 2: more stuff happens

etc. … but this gives you absolutely no context for how the pages (and the content of those pages) will relate to each other when they exist in their final environment – the finished book. It will be especially useless if you have to manage the production of your book yourself!

The following are some simple methods of visualizing imposition and page layouts that I like to use. (Note this is not about actually imposing pages for print; it’s more to help you plan your content.) I usually employ all three depending on where I’m at or what information I need to figure out.

First, a few quick notes to get us on the same page (tee hee):

left and right folio: left-hand page or right hand page

OFC, IFC, IBC, OBC: outside front cover, inside front cover, inside back cover, outside back cover.

saddlestitching: Common and popular staple binding method where you take sheets of paper, fold in half, and then staple them down the middle. Thus, each sheet of paper ends up = 4 pages (two in front, two on the back). You need to plan for a multiple of four. But really, any kind of binding method where you are binding the sheets down the middle (e.g. sewing, or even rubberbanding your pages) would need to take the same kind of page counts into consideration.

With this kind of binding, there is a “holy grail” – the uninterrupted 2 page spread in the middle of the book, which is the sweet spot for important, high-impact images because you don’t have to worry about any misalignment happening in the gutter (middle of the book where the spine is). Every other 2 page spread in the book is made up of two different sheets butting up against each other, so any artwork relying on careful alignment across the middle of the book has a chance of getting slightly messed up.

perfect binding: Individual sheets of paper are bound together with glue on one edge. This is the type of binding you see for most paperback novels. A lot of people think it looks more “professional” than saddlestitching. I mention this mainly because you don’t need to plan as carefully for a specific number of pages, you can just insert or remove more (remembering of course that each sheet = 2 pages, one on front and one on back). Again, any binding method that is binding loose sheets on one edge – all those other mechanical binding methods like coil binding, spiral or wire-o binding, etc. – would have similar page count considerations. (The exception is laying out the cover and an image on the spine, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

OK, here are the methods!

1. Imposition Chart (Table)

This is my default go-to format when I think, “Oh! I want to make a little saddlestitched book. Something around 28 pages. How does that look?” I almost always start with an imposition chart when planning a new book.

Note that in the example, I’ve highlighted the middle if it were a saddlestitched book, but this information is actually not readily available here (you’d need to do some math, fold a mockup, or look at the next method “V-drawing” to find it).

I like this setup because I can quickly see what page number something is on, and a description about the page. Sometimes I try to start writing scripts on the different pages too. Another nice thing is that you can easily create it with a doodle in your sketchbook or in a computer program like Word, Excel, OpenOffice, etc.

When I worked on This Tastes Funny, a perfect bound comics anthology with 6 different artists under our Suddenly Sentai collective, we created an imposition template using a spreadsheet in Google Drive, and shared it with all the artists involved so that everyone could collaborate and plan their comic/page counts:

For anyone who owns a copy of This Tastes Funny, you’ll notice immediately that the order of the stories in the imposition chart doesn’t reflect the final order of stories in the book. But that was fine for our purposes; we just needed to know page counts and whether people started or ended their story on the left or right folio, and we could move things around as desired. For example, my story (The Terribly Traumatic Tale of Prince Tofu) was only 15 pages including my Author Talk. So I immediately saw that there was an empty left folio, and we knew we needed to fill it with something. Hence, random extra doodle.

2. V drawing

This one is specifically for saddlestitched books or books bound down the middle of a folded sheet.

It’s pretty much an “I don’t have anything available/am too lazy to make a physical dummy/mockup right now, so I’m going to draw this” replacement. I usually use it in tandem with the chart method because while it’s not the best for planning content, it’s a great visual shortcut and good way to see where things fall for the reader. As mentioned under the Chart format, you can know immediately where the “holy grail” is! I can also see how many sheets of paper I’m going to need to use to create this book (here, it’s three).

Orient the V however you like – just pretend you have a book open and standing up, and you are either looking down at it from above or looking up at it from below. I like the second option because it’s similar to holding a book open in your hand – the front cover ends up on your left.

3. Thumbnails with Pagination

This method is handy once you start thumbnailing your pages for your comic! It’s very straightforward and is basically paginated thumbnails. Simply draw a bunch of boxes for your pages, and add page numbers to the right or left (to visually indicate whether it’s left or right folio) as you go.

You can put the boxes in any configuration you want. For example, you could combine it with the Chart method and start with 1 box on the first line for the outside front cover, then 2 boxes on the lines below for left and right folio, etc. Or, you could just keep drawing boxes until you hit the end of the sheet of paper you are working on, and then add page numbers. Sometimes I just draw a big grid in my sketchbook and then number the pages that way.

Keeping an even number of pages on one line (so that you have complete spreads together) is probably best to avoid confusing yourself and overlooking opportunities for spreads.

Again, all these are methods that I personally like to use, and while they are helpful individually, they can be even more useful when referenced in conjunction with each other. Others may find these complicated or inconvenient; the most important thing is that you use a technique that works best for you. Hope this helps you find tools or get ideas for your own planning to get full use out of your page layouts!

* Among other things.
** Or sitting, or strolling, etc.

People In Front Of Places was inspired by travel and a bunch of environmental pen drawing exercises I was doing at the beginning of 2013. The contents are exactly what the title implies: I’ve taken photos from various trips and outings, drawn them, then added people (and animals!) to them, then wrote some microfiction and poetry around each of the images that resulted. At the end of the book, you can see all of the original photos as well. Featured places include shots from around Toronto, Montreal, New York City, Austria (specifically Innsbruck and Hall in Tirol), and Tokyo. The oldest photo was taken in 2005; the newest from early 2013.

This black and white zine features 10 original illustrations done with a Pilot V5 0.5 Hi-Tecpoint Liquid Ink rollerball pen.

• first printed: April 2013
• size: 4.25″ x 5.5″, 24 pages plus cover
• binding method: saddlestitched
• production notes: cover printed on Royal Sundance 70 lb. text (Kraft colour and Fiber finish), interior pages printed on Cougar 60 lb. text, back cover and “endpapers” pattern courtesy of scrap papers from The Paper Place
• status: AVAILABLE through Storenvy

You can view work-in-progress photos here.

Because really, that pretty much describes what it is. I’ve taken photos from several trips, drawn them, added people (and animals!) to them, and then created (very) short stories around each of these images.

Here are some photos of my process with the final illustration, completed just earlier today.

This particular photo was a shot of Vauquelin Square in Old Montreal. It probably took me the longest of all the illustrations to finish because I had to work up the courage to shade the face and draw the water spouts from the fountain in pen. In the end, I got through it by playing Guren no Yumiya on loop to put me into an epic devil-may-care mood, put pen to paper and just dooooo ittttt.

Now I need to polish up my writing, impose all my pages, print/assemble/bind/etc. and the book will be ready in time for the Toronto Indie Arts Market on April 13! Hurray!

I started using this Piccadilly notebook my friend gave me, filling it mainly with pen sketches of Posemaniacs and also referencing photos of interesting images – particularly buildings. I’ve been posting some of the sketches on my tumblr. These exercises have inspired me to work more with pen, to actually enjoy it, and just to draw more architecture and environments in general.

So! Naturally, all this got me going on making a new zine. This little publication will feature black and white drawings and microstories. It’s about people and places, and is a bit of fantasy x reality.

Here are a few work in progress photos of one of the interior illustrations, as well as the cover. As you can see from the photos, I’m using a Pilot V5 0.5 Hi-Tecpoint Liquid Ink rollerball pen because … I have a lot of them.

I’m saving paper – so you can see the edges of another drawing just to the left of the cover picture :)

I’ve got about five more illustrations left to go and crossing my fingers it’ll be done in time for the Toronto Indie Arts Market … if not, it’ll definitely be available for Anime North!

Claude C. Kenni and Dias Flac from Star Ocean 2 as a European knight and a Japanese samurai.

Watercolour. Completed March 2013.

View “what becomes of us (we do what we bear / we bear what we do)”

This interactive sequential narrative is my final assignment, or “digital artefact”, for the Coursera course E-Learning and Digital Cultures (#edcmooc).

From the beginning of my #edcmooc course and throughout the discussions each week, I’ve been thinking a lot about our expectations of technology, our portrayals of it, and our impressions of how it transforms our experiences and our own knowledge/perspectives.  Where does the idea of “utopia” come from? From a desire for creating something perfect based on our experience of the world. How does the concept of “dystopia” arise? From the fear of unleashing the worst within us. Are the tools we create making us more or less human? Are we not humans when we create and use them, and is creating and using these tools not what we as humans do? Ultimately when we create new tools, new technologies, and assimilate them into our everyday lives, more than anything else we create mirrors that expand and refract our experiences and perspectives. A continuous evolution, so to speak.

There’s a saying in Chinese: “自做自受” Literally, “self – do – self – bear”. In other words, you bear the results of your own actions. Generally, it has a negative meaning – “you did this to yourself, you dug your own grave; you made your bed, now go sleep in it.” However, the actual words themselves can be quite ambiguous.

One thing that is clear to me is that much of how these expectations and experiences come to be is cyclical and often chicken/egg in nature. As humans, our inventions reflect what we see within ourselves. We are our own catalysts. What we see influences where we as humanity choose to go next. We create what is “human” to us and we respond in a “human” way, and all of these things build endlessly upon themselves in our communal knowledge, the way we think, the way we interact with the world around us. Perhaps the end result may not seem very “human”, and some people may fear this, but it all stems from a very human place. We’re the parents of the technology, and just as children teach their parents, so too do our children take us to places we can only imagine.

This is what I wanted to capture in my final assignment/digital artefact. I wanted to create something highly visual in nature that would be difficult (or impossible) to replicate in a non-digital medium, with the user able to control different aspects and choose how s/he experiences it. So I wrote and illustrated a short poem with the quote “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us” (John Culkin, 1968) and the Chinese saying in mind, and built a loop around it.

Here is the full text of the piece:

what becomes of us
who are we?
we are what we make.
we are what we consume.
we do what we bear
we bear what we do.
this who we are.
this is what we do.
and so we shape what we use
and so they shape
[endless repeat]

Development notes:

• painted using the freeware program FireAlpaca
• horizontal infinite scroll script via JSFiddle
• colourchanging script via JSFiddle
• “Seeing the Future” music by Dexter Britain, from his Creative Commons 2 album; embed from SoundCloud.

Please note those on some versions of Internet Explorer may experience minor glitches when scrolling. For best results, view in Firefox or Chrome. Javascript is needed to view the interactive components.

Original character coming to a comic near you. Hopefully.

Watercolour. Completed February 2013.

At the end of last year, I discovered Coursera. My first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course – a term which makes me picture fighters and mages trotting across idyllic medieval countrysides and holding open textbooks inches from their noses while monsters wander around in circles in the background them), titled E-learning and Digital Cultures (#edcmooc),  just started this week. Obviously, I’m interested in digital culture, communications and technology. That along with my background/connection to education (educational publishing industry, volunteering in adult literacy, even considered doing a Masters in adult education for a while, etc.) made this seem like a perfect candidate for getting my feet wet in Coursera!

The theme of the first half of the course is Utopias and Dystopias. Not surprisingly, this week’s materials include a number of short films and readings on portrayals of technology’s influence on society. There’s commentary around movies like Metropolis and Matrix. There’s a lot of discourse on how technology can be seen as isolating people, controlling them, warping social contact, versus empowering people, creating access to information and connections at an unprecedented scale, etc. From an educational angle, there are also discussions about “Digital Natives” versus “Digital Immigrants” and how they perceive and interact with technology.

At a more personal level, all this is making me reminisce on how I got started on what we affectionately call the intarwebs, and the experiences in my life around it.

I was born at the best time: young enough to not fear computers, old enough to not fear human interaction, dead before robots gain sentience.

When I first saw that tweet in my feed back in March 2012, it put a smile on my face. It’s funny, it’s beautifully witty, it’s perfectly geeky, and it hits on three aspects of what I think are huge in terms of how I was able to experience the “technology” (in this case, internet/digital culture).

I’m a member of the generation that discovered computers while we were of relatively early school age, and grew up with them into our adult lives. (Gosh, it feels weird to type “our adult lives”. When did this happen.) I remember being in (probably) grade three, sitting on the floor listening to a classmate explain email. I remember hearing her recount how a family member mistyped an address and accidentally reached a stranger in France. I remember trying to visualize this and wrap my brain around this, and thinking, “That’s amazing. I don’t think I could ever get something like email.”

The internet wasn’t something that was always a part of our world, but it entered it while we were still of curious enough mindset that we weren’t dissuaded by it, that we didn’t really have to think about being “brave enough” to explore them and help to shape the perspectives and use of them. And that we were coherent enough to think about how we connected with others, that we did connect with others, and that we were able to grow around a common appreciation of things we connected around and find camaraderie in these shared digital experiences.

At the same time, I’ve often joked with friends about how grateful we are that we didn’t get online until we had grown some brain cells, and saved ourselves from having our stupid idiot child selves recorded for eternity all over the Internet. Several years ago, I experienced a digital equivalent of running into someone you haven’t seen in years in the grocery store. I was in an IRC channel when a user spotted my name and made an obscure reference to not only my maiji character as a squirrel, but to some of her habits as I originally envisioned her in my very first online community/fandom (Yu Yu Hakusho, in case you were wondering). She typed it on a whim without expecting a real connection, as my name only triggered the memory, but since it actually was me, I was pretty blown away. In about three seconds I established it was an old friend from back in the day whom I’d had no contact with in the years since. Meanwhile, it also triggered memories of some of the hilariously dumb fanfiction my elementary school self used to churn out. Which must still be floating around somewhere on the intarwebs. (Please don’t look.)

But ultimately, what did the internet allow me to do? At a relatively young age, instead of forcing me to “choose” or have friends based on arbitrary, out-of-my-control things like age or geographic boundaries, it allowed me to form friendships based on something I think is a lot more important: interests. I have friends I grew up with since kindergarten whom I only communicate with online now. I have friends I met online and have come to know very well in person, and sometimes even see each other on a regular basis. I have friends I have never met in person but whom I know better than people I’ve worked with and saw nearly every single day. It’s amazing and wonderful to realize I have friends all over the world from backgrounds and walks of life that can be quite disparate from mine.

Both my offline and online friends were, are, and become as real as it gets. And I look around at us and think, I’m very proud of us. I think I’ve become a pretty productive member of society – I think the vast majority of us have. I’ve watched us grow from kids hanging around on video game message boards to actively challenging each other in creative writing forums to private chats on ICQ to group chats on IRC to linked Livejournal diaries. All our youthful writing and outbursts of silliness and anguish gradually morphing into mature silliness and anguish, even as we migrated from platform to platform, even as we stayed connected or lost touch or found each other again. Or didn’t. Not that different from the “real”, offline world, where people drift in and out of each others’ lives all the time, from childhood to school days to old workplaces.

And I see us as we are now: a large number of us have grown into articulate, creative, smart, lawyers and teachers, illustrators and animators, writers and engineers and more. Some of us have “found our way”. Most of us, like everyone else of any generation, are still looking for it. We stay in touch on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, through emails and even Christmas cards (yes, mailed physical Christmas cards).

I look back with fondness at how we’ve all grown into our digital lives – that is, lives that include the digital. As usual, as with any generation, technology didn’t really warp us all or make us better or worse. Utopia or dystopia? Simply, it’s life. And I do believe mine is richer because of it.

I was once approached by a person at an Artist Alley who wanted to commission me to draw a picture of their significant other, rendered in a manga-influenced style. The significant other wasn’t with them, and they didn’t have a photo either. So naturally I asked some questions, like general body type compared to fictional characters they knew, and things like length of hair and darkness versus lightness. However, one question completely stumped the person. I asked, “Which side is their hair parted on?” And they couldn’t answer.

This is not in any way suggesting that my commissioner was stupid or had absolutely terrible memory or didn’t care enough about their significant other. And it also is not suggesting that my coworkers were stupid or unobservant either. But I think all this hair parting is just one of the many things that say a lot about how we process information, and how easily we take things around us for granted, tuning stuff out as a consistent or unimportant element in the background of our lives. (God knows I often fail to notice things I pass by every day!) We all keep a general impression of people’s faces in our minds, and we might, like in the case of my coworkers, realize something is different with the impression in our recent/recurring memory, but not be able to put a finger on what it is.

We “know” things, so we don’t really see them. This makes sense, because if we gave the same priority to every little thing that happened to cross our path, we’d overload ourselves with useless information and our brains would probably explode or something. We certainly wouldn’t be functioning very efficiently. At the same time, being able to stop for a moment and just take in what’s around you, to really see and be and use all your senses to fully absorb the world you’re in, that can be pretty powerful no matter what your calling in life is, and certainly for people who work creatively and visually.

“I can’t draw. I can’t even draw a straight line.” (I’m assuming here that when most people say “can’t draw”, they mean “can’t draw a realistic representation of something”.) I’m sure I’ve semi-ranted on this topic before somewhere, maybe in my old LiveJournal (I certainly have ranted about it in person to various friends), but when people say things like this, it really works me up. I’m sure most of the time people say it casually, flippantly, or in deference to someone they see as an “artiste”, but it sounds defeatist. And really, I just get upset when I think that people may be writing themselves off as being incompetent when they totally are not, and therefore block themselves off from experiencing something that can be so fun and enjoyable and lovely and wonderful and so many other fulfilling things.

For one, if you can’t draw a straight line, I can’t either and that’s what rulers are for; and two, while I agree that being able to render something realistically does have something to do with skill, I also believe firmly as a skill, it can be honed! And I believe developing that skill has quite a bit to do with making a distinction in your mind between what you expect something to look like without really having seen it for a long time, and actually really seeing it in front of you. And noticing all the details about how perspective is actually warping lines and shapes in front of you and how light hits it and creates different shades of colour in the shadows and so on and so forth. That’s why drawing from life (life drawing sessions, still lifes, etc.) can be so helpful – you’re (re)learning how to see, and the more you do, the greater the understanding grows in your mind about what happens to things in different situations, lighting, angles. That’s the experience that comes with honing the skill.

Certainly, if you’re not used to seeing things in this way, it can be super helpful to have someone guide you. But it’s not like you’re incompetent or deficient in some way that drawing is forbidden to you. I’m probably sounding all ranty, but all I really want to say is, take heart! Learn to see.

(On a lighter note, I’ve also noticed that when people who aren’t usually visually inclined ask me to draw an original character – and they’ve never had this character illustrated before – they often get stumped by a question very similar to the one that stymied my commissioner. How does the character’s hair frame their face, e.g., the hair parting thing? It’s funny that this seems such an insignificant detail, but it makes a big difference in terms of how that character looks. This could probably be a topic for a whole other rambling post.)

I generally let my paintings sit for a few days with the intention of coming back and touching up the piece when I can look at it with fresh eyes. Usually I don’t do much to it, but it always helps. Looking at it right now, I feel like I need to add more dimension and shape to the dark area at the base of the back of the neck; the shoulder looks too low.

I meant to take more photos, really I did. Except I forgot to take a photo of the sketch before I started painting, and then my camera battery died after 2 photos, and then by the time it finished charging I was done. Oh, well …