Angry Birds is the digital cultural reference for this release. In case you aren’t familiar with Wells’ classic, Martians resembling octopi invade Earth. The vision of Martians dropping from the sky made me think of the birds being sling shot into the pigs in the Angry Birds game.

However, I initially worked on a totally different idea for this cover. Email spam. Well, it’s like an invasion. My concept had many cans of Spam (the food item) —with an octopus on the label— invading the Earth.

Fortunately, I thought of and proceeded with the Angry Birds concept. I like it very much! Not sure was Wells would think, though!

I had also originally planned a companion release. The script of the famous radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles (no relation). I had planned to continue with the Angry Birds theme but using a caricature of Orson. Alas, I had discovered that the script is in fact not in the public domain.

Anyhoo, here’s the pencil sketch of my Orson Welles caricature.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells is available for free in both .epub and .mobi format.

My 4th Sketchbook Video has me flipping through my watercolour Moleskine sketchbook from sometime in 2008 or 2009 (I really should add dates in my sketchbooks).

In spite of having grown up frustrated with the medium, I was inspired by the beautiful watercolour work by Calvin & Hobbes creator, Bill Watterson. I thought perhaps I should give watercolours another try. Plus, it gave me an excuse to buy the watercolour Moleskine.

Also featured in this video is a wordless comic strip mystery. Can you figure out what is happening in the story?

My latest sketchbook video features the sketchbooks I used to draw my Snert Oh No web comic in 2010.

I’d draw a one-panel comic during the 1.5 hour wait for my Toastmasters meeting every Wednesday after work. Then I used my iPhone for photographing, post-processing and posting (until a suitable app came along) it on snertohno.com (I wanted to use my laptop as little as possible). You can read all about it on my blog from way back when.

I enjoyed the challenge of drawing in ink without means to erase any mistakes. It sharpens your drawing skills. You’ll see evidence of that in the video – I call them retakes.

I mentioned my 2007 trip to Paris in my last Sketchbook Video. So the sketchbook I used during my trip is featured in my latest episode (I like how that sounds. I guess I’m a video podcaster now).

It’s a Paris Moleskine City notebook. I highly recommend these little things. They are the tour guide you create yourself!

You’ll see quite the strange colour palette I used in this sketchbook. That’s the fault of some Japanese markers I bought in a Japanese store in Pairs (go figure!). They came in weirdest combination. Though frustrating, it did provide some creative ideas on its own (as seen in my previous video).

My second sketchbook video features my followup pocket Moleskine from 2007ish (unlike the first one, I didn’t date my sketches).

I remember this time vividly. I loved the idea of having sketchbooks full of colourful works of art however I ended up forcing myself to create works of art for each page as quickly as possible.

So naturally, that hampered creativity. You’ll see a lot of unfinished pieces among some gems that I am really pleased with.

Lesson learned.

Well, thanks home video technology in my DSLR, iMovie and Vimeo, it can happen a little more than often. I’ve begun making short videos of my flipping through my sketchbooks. So, if you want to flip through them, you’re saved a trip!

Above is my first video which features my Moleskine sketchbook from 2006. This was a time where I was trying different mediums and techniques other than my usual pencil. You’ll see how some methods worked while others didn’t. I further developed those that did work and learned a lot from what didn’t.

The third release in my “tech joke” cover ebook series is 1950s short sci-fi story, The Stutterer by R.R. Merliss.

My goal with the series is to create ebooks with illustrative covers of literature in the public domain. I design the covers using comparable references to today’s digital culture.

My preceeding releases featured the Twitter Fail Whale on the cover of Moby Dick and steampunk on the cover of Wired Love.

The Stutterer is about a stuttering robot from another planet. So naturally, I chose to parody the Android mascot. The robot has a message for the people of Earth. Hence, the RSS logo. Earth in the book has some sort of telepathy P.A. system (Internet, anyone?).

I went for a bit of the Saul Bass style and lots of negative space to reflect the atmosphere of loneliness which the robot endures in the story (not to mention us stutterers have to go through).

You’re going to have to read the ebook (epub, mobi) in order to figure out what the Tesla coils relate to :)

My workflow

First I sketched my designs on paper and planned out the layout. I scanned in the chosen drawings and went straight to work with the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator. Made the background black and all the objects white. That’s it!

This cover was the fastest of the three for me to create since I didn’t need to work with strokes or many different colours. Only black and white.

Most of the Illustrator work was playing with the bezier curves until I achieved the look I needed then proceeded with the fonts.

The right font for impact

I used Impact. Nice and blocky. I find it fits in very well with the overall design and layout. And it’s very readable. I placed the author and my illustration credit at the top right corner to prevent it from interfering with the negative space above the robot and RSS logo and underneath the book’s title.

This look is a lot of fun to create as it’s playful, wild and comes naturally to me. I enjoy designing with this look and will definitely use it again in the future.

Stuttering

While the book has nothing to do with stuttering (nor does it explain stuttering accurately), I chose to work on this book to coincide with this year’s International Stuttering Awareness Day happening on October 22. I stuttered all my life and produce a successful podcast on the topic at stutteringiscool.com.

You can download my ebook for The Stutterer for free in both epub and mobi formats.

If you’re interested in pulp fiction sci-fi, check out my friend, Glenn Schmelzle’s podcast, Science Fiction Afterlife where he reviews golden age sci-fi books.

The second book I illustrated and released as an ebook in my “tech joke” series was Wired Love by Ella Cheever Thayer. First published in 1879, it’s about a female telegraph operator who falls in love with a male telegrapher over the wire.

Yup, chat room romances existed in the telegraph days.

My tech joke series consists of illustrated coves I recreate for classic books in the public domain. Then I assemble them into ebooks and release them for free. My first release was Moby Dick illustrating the whale as the Twitter Fail Whale on the cover.

For Wired Love, I went for a steampunk design since I couldn’t find a suitable related tech joke. Plus, steampunk covers the telegraph era.

The look I had in my head required real 3D software. Since I was using Adobe Illustrator, it would have taken way too long for me to achieve a photorealistic 3D look. So I went for a 2D cartoony style instead.

The drawing combines steel (or is that pewter?), brass, wires and wood. That’s morse code running through the wires. I’ll leave it up to you to decode it ;)

How I created the cover

I consulted a few tutorials on creating the metal look. I won’t reinvent the wheel by including a tutorial on that here since you’ll find plenty on Google (I highly recommend the Vector Tuts site). However, I had to come up with my own method of creating a heart shaped piece of metal.

Google (or Vector Tuts) search for blending objects as well and then you’ll see how easy it is to create a heart shaped metal thingy. Any shape for that matter. It just takes a little time and patience to get the photorealism right.

Really, all I did was create two circles side by side, overlapping each other.

I then made a copy of them in another layer above, shrunk them a bit and then blended them together.

Then I used the pen tool to create the rest of the heart and made a copy of that, too. Guess where I pasted it? Yup, on the other layer with the larger circles. And yes, I increased the size of it, too.

Back on the layer with the smaller circles and rest of the heart – I blended that with the circles. I added a texture to make it look metallic (that’s another search for applying textures to vector art).

Back to the layer with the larger circles: I applied a radial gradient to each circle (at opposing angles for each) with many colours (in shades of grey. You’ll see why in the tutorials you searched for).

I also added a gradient for the rest of the heart.

The straight lined grooves

Just two lines on top of each other with a film grain effect applied to the bottom line. Same with the nails. They are simple circles with a gradient and a film grain copy underneath.

The bright morse code effect

Same method as the grooves except the bottom dots have a blur and glow effect applied to them. Like I did with the other objects throughout this non-tutorial, I kept playing with the settings until I achieved the effect I was looking for.

The joy of creative challenges

This is what I enjoy about creative challenges. Especially when using a challenging program like Illustrator. You have to plan out how you will achieve the look you are trying to achieve. Then achieving it!

One word of warning

You will need lots of RAM when using all these gradients and effects. I didn’t even get into shadows (just for the wires and to separate the heart from the wooden background) and font (another search for 1900s fonts. At the time, I forgot that Wired Love was published way before that).

Wow, after writing it outlined is, the cover totally doesn’t seem the hours and hours and hours and hours of work that it took to perfect it.

You can download my ebook for Wired Love in ePub format viewable in most e-readers or mobi for the Kindle.

Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging about the inspiration and decisions behind the 3 ebooks covers I illustrated, assembled into actual ebooks and launched last week.

The gimmick here is I choose public domain books available on Project Gutenberg and illustrate a cover for them. Using references to today’s digital culture.

For instance, today, I talk about my first release, Moby Dick by Herman Melville (epub, mobi).

Being a Twitter nut, it’s obvious why I chose Moby Dick to be the debut release in my “Tech Joke” series. The great white whale as the Twitter Fail Whale.

I went for my trademark stylized-and-thick-brush-strokes-and-one-colour-scheme look. It gives an fun look to a long, dauntingly descriptive book to read. The dark blues, angry skies and splashy ocean make for quite a thrilling atmosphere. Overall, it reminds me of the early colour cartoons like Rocky and Bullwinkle. The brush strokes are reminiscent of The Inspector cartoons.

I enjoy working with thick brushes (first inspired by The Group of Seven) and a riot of colours. And that whale looks like he’s having one of those days again!

My process was simple: sketch with pencil and paper, scan ( I used my iPhone!), open up in Adobe Illustrator, go nuts with the pen tool and brush strokes.

Assembling the ebook was a lot more complex than I had thought. I thought it was simple as, well, using the export to epub tool in Adobe InDesign. After many hours and days of frustration and Google searches, my process ended up being the convoluted:

1. Go to the Project Gutenberg site for the book (there’s a Canadian Project Gutenberg, too!)

2. Choose the HTML version (You can use the plain text version but I found it creates a lot more work when removing carriage returns. However, sometimes HTML isn’t the right one to use so you’ll have to try it and see. Be aware that using plain text can also insert funny characters into the mobi version for Kindle. Good times!).

3. Select all and copy

4. Paste into Text Editor. Remove whatever you don’t want to include (but keep the Project Gutenberg licensing info at least). Copy again.

5. Paste into InDesign

6. Do whatever it is you do to make all the text flow across all the pages.

If text ends up pasted with carriage returns, use find and replace to remove them. You will need to select the area from the end of one line to the beginning of another. When you paste it into the Find field, you should see a ^p show up. Add nothing in the replace field. I found that typing ^p didn’t work. You have to actually do the selecting, copying and pasting. You will need to play around with this because you will end up removing ALL spaces.

7. Once you have step 6 done and calmed down a little, select all the text and convert to Times New Roman. Otherwise, you’ll get letters removed once you convert to epub. The reason is something like epub can’t handle words with double letters so it drops one of them. This may be due to the type of font you use (I forget which one). Times New Roman is missing whatever the other fonts have so I use this one. As I read, in the end, the devices choose the font to display your ebook anyway.

8. Import the pdf in Calibre, a great free tool to read and convert ebooks into many, many formats.

9. Select the pdf and press the Convert button.

10. Choose which format you’d like to convert to.

11. Add in the title of the book, etc.

12. Add the cover you’d like to use (you will need to scroll down in Calibre to choose your file. Both jpg and png files seems to be ok to use).

13. Now you need to tell Calibre what to do with the converted files. Right click on the pdf and make your choice.

I prefer “Save to disk in a single directory” to keep things tidy. As you can see, you get everything saved including the opf file. My guess is you can use this to make edits to the epub without having to go back to the original file (in this case, the InDesign file).

See? Quite simple. I’m sure there’s a better, quicker, more efficient way to do this but I’m new to InDesign and learned that the epub format is quite limited. Also, Stanza can be temperamental so be sure to test across multiple devices.

To move the files to your iPad, simply click and drag the epub to iTunes and proceed to syncing from there. If you prefer to use another epub reader, connect your iOS device, open up iTunes, click Apps, scroll down to the bottom, choose the ereader app, drag the epub file (from Finder) to the area designated for transfering files.

I don’t have a Kindle so I don’t know the method for transferring files to it. But Amazon seems to!

Edit: Looks like there’s an issue with the Kindle. It seems the book opens up not on the cover but on the 1st page. I guess this method may not be the optimal one for the Kindle. Please do leave tips in the comments below so that I can fix this.

The first ebook, which needs no introduction, is Moby Dick. Naturally, I paid homage to the Twitter Fail Whale. It is available in epub format viewable on iOS devices and many ebook readers and desktop applications including Stanza and Calibre. I also have a version available for the Kindle.

The second ebook is a lesser known novel called Wired Love. It’s subtitle will give you a hint of what the book is about; A Romance in Dots and Dashes. Yup, two telegraph workers fall in love over the telegraph wire. It’s Victorian chicklit that’s still relevant for the Internet Age.

I went for a steampunk look for the cover. Like Moby Dick above, it’s available in epub and Kindle formats.

The third ebook is my hommage to my stuttering community with 1950s sci-fi, The Stutterer. It’s about a stuttering robot with a message for Earthlings. I went for the Saul Bass look for the cover. Can you find all the modern day digital tech references? Available in epub and Kindle format.

Please note that the explanation of the causes of stuttering in this story is extremely inaccurate. See Stuttering Facts and Information for an accurate explanation. The Stuttering Homepage also provides loads of goodies about stuttering as well as being host to the International Stuttering Awareness Day online conference. Speaking of which, the release of this ebook coincides with this year’s International Stuttering Awareness Day, October 22, 2011.

I thoroughly enjoyed creating these and I am working on more ebooks to come! Up next are a few releases for Hallowe’en.