Putting the Pieces Together

            After math class, I continued putting all of my images and text into the Blurb software. Initially, I imagined having one image cover the whole page and have text overlapping the image. However, I ended up changing the format so that the image covered most of the page with the text appearing underneath the image. I also formatted the fonts so that they would all be different colors matching their respective illustrations. As I briefly spoke about yesterday, the hardest part about putting the images and text into Blurb was reformatting the font to fit the “Print Safe” lines on each page. For each letter, I wrote approximately four sentences about the item, place, custom, etc. Once I started copying the text into the book, I realized that each letter required a different about of text. For example, the shorter words like “Java” required a lot more text than longer words like “Zero Degrees Latitude.”  I had to make these adjustments on the go as I formatted each page.

            I also had a lot of trouble with image resolution quality. Blurb would often give me a warning that some of my photos did not have the desirable resolution quality for a printed book. These messages scared me the most because I did not know how to improve the resolution without losing the watercolor effects. Luckily, I found an online review of Sketcher that showed that the photos could be saved in different size formats. When I went back to my photo files, I found that the automatic download size was not the largest size possible. Once I changed the file size to a much larger format, the warnings about image resolution disappeared! This was such a relief for me because I do not know what I would have done if my images from Sketcher did not work. When I was panicking, I did talk to some of my friends about the possibility of just using raw images to illustrate the book. They thought that this was a great idea, and many of my friends actually talked about how some of their favorite children’s books used photographs instead of traditional illustrations. Regardless, I was able to fix the problem and am finally seeing the book come together!