The Dawn of Bubbles

You might remember my last post with my first attempt at a cover for my Dawn of Bubbles collection book. It didn’t feel that great so in the end, I decided to use it for the back cover and do something more simple for the cover. 

The result is what you see above. Somehow, it feels more Dawn of Bubbles than my previous attempt and I like it. Nice and clean. 

With the cover, I now also present you the book. I first tried with Aperture but I decided on using Blurb in the end. As an added bonus of using Blurb, I have the possibility of making the ebook version available without much effort on my part. I initially wanted to have it made available for free but I didn’t want to bother with finding hosting for the huge PDF file. Blurb charges 1.99$ for the ebook but I’ve set the price to 2.99$ (0.99$ would be for me, if someone ever decides on buying). 

With Blurb, anyone can also buy a print copy (I’m not doing any real promotion so it’s more theoretical). 

With this book, I wrap up the project.

It feels great to wrap it up nicely. 

This is one of the post-project artifacts I wanted to do: a photo montage composed of multiple posts. If you’re interested, I can tell you this wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.

Naively, I thought my computer would handle all posts on separate layers with me switching between them to tweak and work on the picture. I quickly found out this was way too taxing for real work. Starting over, I added images one by one and with more or less having each piece merged back to a single layer before moving on to the next. 

It worked. But there’s one big downside: once a layer is merged, I can’t tweak transitions between pieces. I could probably have combined multiple images into one layer with some buffer to do some tweaking but it would have required a bit more experience on my part. I guess this goes to show that I don’t know much about serious image manipulation (although, it’s not something I was expecting to learn with this project anyway). 

I’m thinking of making this the cover of the Dawn of Bubbles ebook. The ebook is just something I’ll do because it nicely wraps the projects. I’ll probably do a print for myself but I don’t have any bigger plans: it’s just me celebrating something I did. 

I didn’t have a clear picture in mind when I had the idea of making this photo collage and this is how it turned out. I tend to prefer nice and clean photos to overcrowded ones and, a bit disappointingly, this one falls into the latter category. Is it too much? Any thoughts?