Formatting A Bleed Page For My Children's Book
Pasting in the art, and making sure essential elements are in the safe area
About this newsletter: I’ve written a children’s book, and I’m going to self-publish it. I’m sharing everything I learn as I make that exciting journey!
In my last post, I talked about how the art in children’s books often bleeds off the page; i.e., the color goes right up to the edge and seemingly beyond it.
To achieve this effect, you make your illustrations a little bigger than the book’s final trim size by adding an extra eighth-inch (0.125”) to the top, bottom, and outer edge of each page.
After the book is printed, this extra bleed area gets trimmed off.
Naturally you don’t want any key elements of your drawing to be cut off, so it’s important to keep all the important parts of your image in a “safe area.”
To help us keep track of everything, we use a template to position each illustration on its bleed page. This is the template I used (below). I explained where I got it and how I fine-tuned it in my previous post.
The pink area is the extra 0.125” that will be trimmed away. The purple block is our safe area. We don’t want to risk losing key parts of an illustration by positioning them too close to the bleed area.
So how exactly does an illustration get positioned on the template, and then adjusted so it fits?
If I delete the color above, and just leave the guidelines, my blank template looks like this (below). The trim size is 8.5” x 8.5”, with an eighth-inch (0.125”) added to the top, bottom, and outer edge. The gutter is on the left for a right-hand page, and vice versa.
My children’s book is mostly pictures, with minimal text. I thought a square shape would be best for helping the pictures really stand out.
I did the line drawings on 8.5” x 11” paper, and made the drawings as big as possible, namely 8.5” x 8.5”. I scanned them into my computer at x1.5 and made the necessary resolution adjustments so the resulting digital images were 12.75” x 12.75” with a resolution of 300 dpi, which is the minimum resolution needed for print.
My thinking at the time: I’d have more flexibility re the book’s trim size. Maybe I’d opt for a larger size, say, a 10” square book. I found out later that 8.5” x 8.5” is the largest available square-shaped trim size option at both Amazon KDP and IngramSpark. I failed to do the necessary research.
I created a couple of borders (12.75” and 12” square) around my scanned images that mimicked the idea of bleed and safe areas. Then I fitted each line drawing into the inner square which served as my “safe area.”
I used an image-editing program called Pixelmator to add color and lighting effects to each line drawing. Here’s what Page 16, a lefthand page, looked like when I was done:
When I copied and pasted it into the bleed page template, it was obviously too big (below). Not surprising since I had scanned in the original line drawing at 1.5 times the size of the trim area (roughly 12.75” vs. 8.5”).
That’s easily fixed in Pixelmator: you just keep reducing the image proportionately until it fits. Here’s what it looked like after the first reduction. Still a little too big, since the text and some key elements of the image fall outside the safe area.
I reduced it a bit more and centered it on the template. Now all the text and essential elements of the drawing are within the safe area (below). A reminder here that the bleed page itself (the full area represented by the template) is 8.63” wide by 8.75” high. That’s because we’re adding an eighth-inch (0.125”) to the outer (non-gutter) edge and the top and bottom of the 8.5” x 8.5” trim size.
Final step: clear the guidelines and crop the image at the outer edges of the template. That gives us a bleed page that’s exactly 8.63” x 8.75”.
Hey, that Fred gets around! He starts out in a tree on a desert island, and by Page 16 he’s in Egypt, heading for the Pyramids!! And that’s just the start of his adventures!! Cheers, see you in the next post!
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And if you enjoyed this post, I’d appreciate a restack!— thank you!! 👍🙏😊