GS Artbook Rambles (sneak peek)

Hello everyone! I just thought I'd post a quick random ramble and a quick sneak peek of what I've been doing for the GS art book so far.

There's not actually that much to look at though. Rofl! 

The main thing I've been working on is setting up the master pages for the book. This is my first time working with something like Affinity Publisher. I used Photoshop for the Changeling books and of course, something like Publisher is designed for this sort of work so it's much more efficient.

With a master page, you can set up a template with different elements that you can then apply to pages in  the book itself. So this is one of the templates for background images that allows me to put a large version of the BG, followed by three of the variations and one sort of call out to highlight a detailed area.

Images can then be clipped to the individual shapes (which I made different colours in the master just so I can see them.

The hard thing is trying to anticipate multiple ways of setting up a page. Not all the BGs have the same amount of variations. Not all of them have details I'd like to highlight. So I've tried to create multiple templates for the different BGs.

Of course, you also have to think about the more functional components of a book like organising different sections, etc. I'm really trying to keep things fairly simple and clean because the point of this book is the art, not the book itself.

I don't have a lot of the actual pages set up yet. I have a few done just to test out how it's going to look when it is complete or to help arrange different elements on the page. (For instance, testing if my text blocks are big enough for reasonable blurbs since we all know how much I write.)

I think the art book is probably going to be quite large. But hopefully getting all the master pages set up in advance will help me get it done reasonably fast. 

And I intend to re-use some of this styling for the lore book as well - though that will, of course, be more text oriented. 

So yeah, it's been a fun adventure learning to use Affinity Publisher but it really has been worth the price and this process has been (so far) way easier than making something like this in photoshop.

I'm looking forward to putting this together fully once Gilded shadows is complete and I have all the art. I think it's going to look really cool - and will hopefully have some fun little development tidbits in there for everyone to read.

That's all for this sneak peek! 

~Esh