I’ve just completed work on the new paperback version of An A-Z of Australian Bush Creatures. It’s a trimmed down more sleek version of the original. With pages trimmed to bleed for a whole new look and feel.

An A-Z of Australian Bush Creatures (ppbk) has been sent to the printers as a NEW 85% sized paperback version. This edition will be called the ‘Trade Edition’ and it is designed for entry into the mainstream market of the likes of BIG W and other department stores. These stores seem to prefer or like a certain size of book at a certain price point so we have tailored this to the smaller format.

This version will be trimmed and the image will “bleed” so when I took off the “white border” or “White Frame” around my images I had to explore the extensive photoshop layers around the edges. It wasn’t easy rebuilding each illustration to bleed over every edge and most images have 360 plus layers of detail. Each illustration is over 12GB in size so this took a little bit of time. Although I carefully peeled back the white layers to see where the image ran out and found some really cool stuff on some images and difficult fixes on others. The ‘Bleed’ was a great exploration as even though my book was 85% the size of the first edition the tim and bleed expansion meant the images were only reduced by 98% in some cases and 95% at worst.

So I guess you have the original book in paperback that is nearly the same as the first only different. The magic, I think will be seeing it as they say … trimmed and to bleed.

It will bring an exciting dynamic to the NEW book and I hope the department stores pick up on the accommodations made to get a round peg in a square hole for their internal buyers.

I hope people like this version.

This is the original art without the White frame. I get some extra bits and some of the leaves end Quite abruptly. Notice the bright branch limb below the Karak (Red Tailed Black Cockatoo) Bottom Centre. It goes nowhere! This was hidden by the frame and now I have to hide with trim or rejig layers.
Here is the finished trimmed piece. The trim just clips the branch so that we can assume that the branch twists down below the Karak or Red Tailed Black Cockatoo.