I was lucky enough to be allowed to watch my books being printed at my local printing firm on their lithographic printer.
This is the pile of paper being sucked up and passed on. Each sheet will hold 8 pages of my book which is later folded and trimmed.
The paper goes down the slide weeeeee.
The sheet has to go through four colour plates; yellow, cyan, magenta, and black.
Lastly it gets coated with a silk finish then appears here!
The sheets get checked for colour variance and any errors then the machine is adjusted accordingly before the final print run. On this print run they enhanced the blues so my dragons would be bright and vibrant! The final sheets will get folded, trimmed, and bound on a separate machine.
Watch my video of the printing process.