Splendours of China Books Coming Soon!

After about 4-5 months work, these books will be ordered tomorrow from Blurb! I've ordered several tests of various aspects of the books the company creates, allowing me to gain a better understanding of what I need to do to get the most out of the service. One such book was the 'Art of Aion' book posted a few posts below. 

These books all tell the same story, but in different ways. Centre-stage is the photobook, which also includes an abridged version of the journal text alongside 440 pages of photos! Then there is the story book, which covers the entire journey in detail, and is also accompanied by a few photos. The last book is a plain text book printed in black & white, and is the entire story, including more thoughts on different subjects and more ramblings on. 

Hardback Image-wrapped, Standard Semi-Matte Photo Paper, Full Colour printing.

Hardback, Bleach-white Standard Paper, Full Colour printing.

Softback, Black & White printing, Economy Cream Paper.

Hopefully everything goes well and they all come out just as expected! When they truly are finalized, they will be posted up here as interactive .SWF books. I have not decided yet if I will try to sell the photobook through Blurb though.

Aion Artbook

This is something else that I have been working on. I originally only created it to test a few things about the quality of Blurbs book printing services, but the project quickly gained momentum with the amount of data I had to put into it.

Aion is an online MMORPG that I played on and off from 2009 > 2015, sinking a lot of time into it. While this is often seen as a bad thing, I did meet some great friends through this game, and loved playing it with them! To make the most of the ridiculous amount of time that I played it, I thought I may as well make it the subject for a book.

You can view the finished version of the book that was sent to the printers, here:

WARNING: This book is 20MB in file-size, so it might take a minute of two to load up. When it does, you should see a white page with AION's logo on it. Click or click and drag the top corners of the pages to turn through it.

Book Unavailable until late April 2016

View Full Size here!

My photobook of my travels through China over March > April is taking a while it seems. I'm adding a written journal in with the photos too, and its taking a long time to make sure there are no mistakes and that I'm not leaving things out. 

Currently I'm throwing together some tests for the printers to see the quality of the end book, and to guide myself with colours and contrast required in each photo. I plan to have this all done by the end of July, at the latest! I'm eager to get back onto sculpting!

I started a drawing in Photoshop the other day but I've not had time to progress with it any further yet. Once this book is done I can refocus my efforts to my next project, and get my portfolio site back up and running! 

In the mean time, here is an example of what I've been working on these past few months:

Splendours of China Book

So since I got back from China roughly a month ago, I've been busy sorting through all 12-13,000 photos, and arranging them and adding metadata to each of them with all kinds of random information such as GPS locations and weather information from the days they were taken, etc. It has taken quite a while to do properly, but its finally done now!

The next stage was to develop a photobook of the holiday. I was originally going to go with the same company I went with last time, Book Printing UK, but a friend at work told me about what he believes to be a better place to get it done, Blurb. Upon reviewing both options, taking into account options given such as sizes and paper qualities, I decided Blurb was the way to go this time.

It is fun creating this but its also somewhat a daunting task with the amount of photos I have, and the amount of information I want to put into the book. I kept a travel journal while I was out there which will be re-written properly, and put into this book in the appropriate places. I also want to talk more about the history for specific areas and objects, as well as China in general, so its a lot of things to consider.

The above page layout will be used in the book appendix to show a double-page spread per city of photos taken. It allows for 234 photos per city, but that's already not enough for most cities. At least selecting these photos is easier than trying to find good photos to use as section covers and the book cover from the thousands of photos taken!