Christmas 2018

After much head scratching, this was the Christmas card for 2018. It's our new cat flying out with the presents. Picture was drawn with Derwent Intense Pencils, plus a little help from Photoshop. Photoshop added a couple of shadows and added the white lines which had disappeared when I got the paper too wet.

Inktense

Probably my favourite watercolour pencils. Not joking. I've tried a number of different sets of watercolour pencils - and I always come back to these. Three reasons: controllability, the strength of colour when wetted and the permanence when dry. I first discovered these a few years ago, but until now I've never had a set as large as this. The wooden case is a nice way to store them and a real plus.
When I'm using these I like to do an outline first. Normally I use the Indigo pencil, sketching lightly as I don't want to drive the colour into the paper at this point. Incidentally, I use Derwent's watercolour paper,  as it has a particularly smooth surface. Then, using a bush I hydrate the lines I want and bring them out to a wash if required. Finally I rub out with a regular eraser all the lines I don't want. As long as the paper is very dry, I leave it overnight usually, this works pretty well.
Then because the wetted pencil is dry and therefore permanent I add the other colours as required. One thing I do is check the colours, both by themselves and as over colour; Inktense pencil colours are a lot brighter and often slightly different to what you might expect so it pays to test somewhere. If you look at the sample picture you can see where I've done this along the lefthand edge.

After that, I use them like waterproof inks. Shade the areas I want to colour, use a water brush to stroke out the colour, let it dry and apply more as required. The image attached to this review is a section of one I did for a Christmas card this year and other than a few black lines done with a Derwent fine liner is all inktense pencils. I should note that this had further work done after this scan; but I think it shows the versatility and colour you can expect.
If I have one niggle, it's that the pencil is quite soft and doesn't hold a point for very long. I can work with that, but it would be nice to see these available in a mechanical pencil one day.  Until then, I'm very happy with my 48!

Print conundrum and smooth running...

Been trying to help with a print job. Author has had all sorts of issues. One thing that rand an alarm bell was finding out that the author needed to edit a PDF. 
Noooooo....

This isn't good. I know you can (After all I did the Adobe exam in PDF many years ago) but really PDF is a delivery medium. Not a work in progress file. They are designed to be bolted down. Attempts to do big edits is nearly always bad voodoo.

Suggested workflow

This is the kind of workflow you need. Basically, it's your text > InDesign >PDF. Consider each of the ">" as a one-way street.

In more detail:

1. Your manuscript. Completely finished and proofread, any graphics either scanned properly or to be created. Once you’ve passed it over, I wouldn’t expect anything other than very minor tweaks to the copy. You need/should not do any formatting other than very basic forms such as Chapter heads, subheads, lists, footnotes. If you are doing an index that will be done after formatting. Page numbers/folios will be added automatically, Contents, footnotes will be positioned and generated automatically.
2. I would take your text file and images (if any) and would do a quick and dirty format to judge length etc. I would properly format a chapter and send that back to you as a pdf for checking approval of layout style, fonts, sizes, etc.
3. Then make tweaks as required. 
4. Once approved the remaining sections of the book would be formatted - each chapter, if it suited the book, would be sent for proofing individually.
5. Once whole book approved, print-ready PDF would be generated. 

Printing the book.

Then I looked around for some low-run print prices. As usual huge variation, from around £3.50 a copy to over £8. Same product, same quantity, same spec. 

I only half understand why this is. I assume that expensive printer may be subcontracting to cheap. Or quality may be different, or expensive printer deals with people who need a lot of hand-holding while cheap printer just talks print speak. But it's still a huge difference.

Aims for lessons 2018

Some of the graphics I generate for lesson aims and objectives...