Thanks for adapting to my new every other week posting schedule for the next few months!

So, HOW did I get around having to manually create all those regions overlapped by the transparent eye beam? Clearly I love this book enough to go through what I had gone through thus far, but frankly I don’t think ANYTHING would be worth this amount of painstaking work. Sorry.

I did the only thing I could think of, and that was to cheat.

The fundamental difference between the programs Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop is the method by which the artwork that you are creating, is “created” by each software’s programming. Adobe Illustrator is math-based, so when you draw a line, you describe it by its color, its length, and its quality through numbers and coordinates. If you recall from math class, a line that starts out thick, ends up thin, is really wiggly here, or smooth there, is described by x- and y- coordinates at each point at which it changes direction. So at MINIMUM, a line can be described as such:

Start point: x=3, y=10; end point: x=7, y=28.

Now, add in a bunch of other numbers/equations to describe the thickness/thinness, the color, etc, et voila! You get how the information about a line gets stored for Adobe Illustrator! These are called vector formulas.

Imagine what those formulas look like with a drawing filled with lines, shapes, gradients, shadows, highlights, etc. etc.

Now let’s take a look at Photoshop (right side of image). When you draw in Photoshop, pretty much the only thing Photoshop cares about is: What color is that particular square in the grid of your canvas? That’s it.

So, when it came time for me to figure out how to represent all those regions that a change in color occurs due to the eye beam overlap, it made sense just to pixelate the entire picture by “converting” it to a Photoshop image.

You may be wondering why I didn’t use Photoshop in the first place? Answers, next post!

Hello everyone!
I will be on a reduced schedule for the next few months. Our posts will come every other week, so please come back on Tuesday, January 19, for the next installment of our self-publishing journey!

I hope everyone enjoyed some great holiday celebrations. Happy 2016, and let’s get back to our journey to self-publishing. One note, I may be on an altered post schedule over the next few months, so please stay tuned.
If we were trying to keep track of the real time I spent with addressing each of these technical issues, there was probably another week spent on fixing the gradients and testing them out with the PDF version of the files. But I got all the troublesome gradients switched, and in my 68th time running it through the pre-flight software (this is a program that catches any issue the actual printing process will have with your file, before you send it to the printer. The printer must provide the actual specs, as my platform did), I came upon YET ANOTHER error:

“This file contains spot colors and transparency. This may produce unexpected results if converted to process outside of Illustrator.”
 
If you notice in the left-hand image (that I keep using as it seems to have had every possible error contained in it alone), Centipede Dragon’s two eye beams pass over the fence, the sheep, and the shepherd. The reason you can see what’s underneath is because I applied a transparency to the eyebeam. The right-hand image shows how the beams would look without the transparency.
 
Unfortunately, this is a mathematically-derived effect that the software performs for our monitor viewing enjoyment. But the printing process failed math, and therefore, cannot re-create the transparency.
 
One solution was to take every overlapping bit of that is a different color, actually cut that piece out, and create a new color that simulates the old color being passed over by the “transparent” color. Basically, the original color is altered due to the color of the beam. I cut that piece of the sheep face, or the sheep wool, or the leg, the fence post, the grass, whatever, and make a new color using the Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black percentages until I match the color created by the tinting of the beam’s color.
 
Now, do you think at this point I really want to do that?