It has been a long time since I posted an update on my blog. Not because I was lazing around doing nothing, but because I decided to turn my story photos into a graphic novel and it’s turning out to be a long and challenging project. It is far from done, but here are a few excerpts to show what it looks like currently.
The first challenge was to find out what a graphic novel looked like and how they work. Fortunately my library had some nice examples that gave me plenty of food for thought. The next challenge was to find a program in which I could create said graphic novel with the greatest ease and smallest learning curve. I’m familiar with Illustrator, and I have a very old version of InDesign, which would probably be better - however I never did get the hang of using it well and the thought of fighting with it meant my project would never get started. I have Pages on my MacBook, but that is a clumsy program at best, and although I tried, it proved too frustrating. I invested instead in a small inexpensive program called iStudioPublisher. This I have found easy to use and has some great tools that let you easily put photos into odd shapes and link or move them around. Of course the acid test is getting something printed, but that will have to wait a while.
All terribly boring, but necessary, were questions like - How do you publish a graphic novel? What size should it be? What printing parameters are there? All these had to be thought through in order to set the pages/margins etc before I even got into putting the novel together.
I’m not short of photos of Nieva’s story, but to make a graphic novel interesting you sometimes need different images than the all encompassing views I took originally. In some cases I was able to crop photos, or just use a closeup view, but for others I did not have the angle or background required and I had to reshoot. That’s what I did with the closeups of the Merfolk for the page above.
One of the biggest challenges is the use of words. I have a written story of some 26,000+ words, so how do you reduce that to a few choice sentences for each page of images? It becomes a very different animal indeed! Mostly it becomes dialog, with a few bits of brief explanation thrown in. I’m still learning a lot and the project continues…