Creating a canvas in Procreate

Choosing a trim size and adding bleed.

No matter what trim size you decide to go for, it is important to always take in to account the books bleed. Put simply, the “bleed” is the part of your canvas that will be cut after printing. So, if your picture book has images that reach the edge of the page part of it will be cut off.

How Much?

The standard bleed size is 0.125 inches off the top and bottom of your canvas (0.25” in total) and 0.125 inches off the side opposite the gutter; in other words the outside of the page.

Practical Example

I decided to use Amazon KDP’s 8.5 inch trim size, which led me to create a canvas of (8.5 + 0.125) wide and (8.5+0.25) high. Equaling to a grand total of 8.625 inches wide and 8.75 inches High. That however caused some issues when using Procreate.

Procreate Layer Limit

Procreate limits the layer available based on canvas size, 8.625” * 8.75” is very large and limited me to 15 layers, which is a great hindrance when trying to keep the elements of your illustrations separate from one another (i.e character, foreground or background). You may need to keep everything as separate as possible in case you need to move things around later.

So, how do we get around this?

What I did was convert the inches to pixels, 8.625” * 8.75” gave me 828pixels * 840pixels which is a tiny canvas size. So I multiplied the pixels by 4 and got 3312p * 3360p at a DPI output of 400 and 44 layers at my disposal, which is way more than enough.

Result

At first glance, it may seem that all this has amounted to is a less than perfect square canvas, but it will all come together when combined with the next blog that tackles the file creation with Affinity publisher. In closing, if you decide to choose a different trim size the procedure is the same add 0.125” to the width and 0.25” (0.125top + 0.125bottom) to the height of your canvas size.