This blog post is about a flipbook experiment I always wanted to try out.
On YouTube I saw some artists showing their sketch books in videos called “Flip Through”. These videos are fun to watch and I was thinking about my own sketch books.
I love to use this blog as an archive for my work. Posts with pictures or picture galleries work very good for me. But sometimes I feel the need to document a whole sketchbook in a different way.
Inspired by the flip through videos and online magazines and catalogues, I started to google.
I decided to try out a digital flipbook, because it gives you the impression of a whole sketch book including the cover pages and the feeling of turning the pages.
Because I’m a bit impatient I started with a „fake“ sketchbook and one of the first free WordPress plugins I found: 3D FlipBook. It works, but I’m not recommending this plugin yet, because I do not have enough experience with it. But here is a short first impression:
Pros: Free plugin, no login needed, converting a PDF into a flipbook was not that complicated, minimalistic look, turning the pages works nice, …
Cons: The free version seems to have limited options according to the appearance at least in the WordPress view, the flipbook preview did not work in my case, …
What does „fake“ sketchbook mean?
As mentioned before I’m a bit impatient and can’t wait to realize a new idea or project. That’s why I did not want to spend too much time, digitize one of my real sketchbooks. I decided to paint a minimalistic sketchbook with all the needed pages and content:
- front cover page plus back
- blank pages
- content pages
- back cover page plus back
Final Flipbook
Have fun browsing and please don’t be too strict. Remember that I am an absolute rookie.
In the end I’m very happy with the final flipbook and it was great to see quick results. But I’m not so sure If I will do it the same way again.
Next time I will take a deeper look into the different Flipbook creators and the editable options for the appearance. For example shadows, opacity and colours. Also I have to improve the way I digitze my sketchbook. This includes the settings of my scanner and the software to crop the scanned pictures.
By the way. I really enjoyed to paint these small and playful pictures. Maybe I will do some more abstract painting in the future.
Overview of the paintings:
