A long time ago (October 20, 2015) we discussed that I had to break up each spread image I had originally created into its two separate pages. This was a specification of the submission process, so I did what they told me to do. Now as you all know, plenty of books contain illustrations that spread across two pages, but you’ll also note that a book has a binding, where the pages get held together. This means a part of the actual page gets used in the binding. So, if my illustration went all the way to the right edge of the left-hand page, and the left edge of the right-hand page, then that piece of the illustration would get gobbled up into the binding. This particular edge had to be handled differently than the bleed margin, as discussed in the October 27, 2015 post.
With the bleed margin, I got to add a bit to the overall size of the page on 3 sides: the outer edge of the book, the top, and the bottom. This would allow for the page to be trimmed down to the final 8.5” x 8.5” size, resulting in the color of the background covering the entire page.
Now with the gutter, I had to move the image AWAY from the edge about a quarter inch, while allowing the background to extend the entire width of the page. This is because this portion of the page will be used to glue the book together. If I didn’t do that, the picture itself would be disjointed in the middle (left), rather than seemless (right).
HOORAY! Now, all we have to do is repeat this process on 30 more pages….hooray…