Hold the front page! I just found the coolest website, and I’m not talking about FarmVille, although that is pretty cool. No, I’m talking about CreateSpace: Self-Publish and Distribute Your Books, Video and Music On-Demand which is an Amazon.com website.
I’ve been painting my digital illustrations and writing my stories for some time now; sometimes science fiction, sometimes children’s picture books, but always with only my blog here at Starbright as a creative outlet. But CreateSpace seems like it might be an easy, low-maintenance way to get really published, on paper, in a good old-fashioned book. They provide a free ISBN number, they provide templates to download and follow when creating your book and there is a forum of lovely like-minded creative types right there on the site for support.
So today has been a lot of fun, I created an account with CreateSpace, for free, and downloaded a template so I could get going and make the cover for “I Am Spiralcat”, a children’s picture book. Me and my girlfriend have had the idea for this children’s picture book for some time, and it has come close to being published a couple of times, but this seems the perfect way to take control of the project ourselves.
There have been some frustrations too today though. CreateSpace provide a nice template in png format for GIMP or psd format for Photoshop, and anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time will be able to predict that my first instinct was to use GIMP to create my image. Unfortunately GIMP just wasn’t up to it. It was verrry verrry slowwww indeed. I tried as hard as I could, because I do love it so, but whatever I did, it just couldn’t handle the huge, high-resolution image that you have to create. Just changing the transparency of a layer took ten minutes, and when I messed with the preferences to give GIMP more RAM and turned off all the thumbnails it took, nine minutes to calculate the same transparency change. So I was forced to use Photoshop CS3.
Photoshop has behaved impeccably and hardly seems to notice the hugely inflated size of the file, the pen on my graphics tablet lags a bit sometimes and the file takes a few seconds longer than normal to save, but that’s about it. Apparently the new version of GIMP with it’s non destructive editing and other such technical marvels will be able to compete, but until then I’ll be using Photoshop to create my children’s picture book for CreateSpace and Amazon, and GIMP only for smaller low res images for the website.
I’ll be posting my progress with the illustrations for the book, with all their unique challenges and fun features, and of course I’ll be digital painting the odd spaceship in GIMP from time to time too.
» Entangled Elephants, aTextured Drawing done in Inkscape, stage 1
