A Steller's Jay in Gouache

In my children’s book the protagonist is a young Steller’s Jay. I plan to use one of my end matter blank pages for a painting of an actual Steller’s Jay. If you live on the West Coast of the United States, you’re probably noticed these noisy, playful birds that might be called Blue Jays. I always called them that, but when I was doing research for the book, I thought it would be a good idea to double check. I found out that Blue Jays are East Coast birds. What I’ve been calling Blue Jays are actually Steller’s Jays.

I’ve been drawing the comic version of a Steller’s Jay so often that I was unsure whether I could paint a real Jay. I decided to use gouache because I really need the practice.

Here’s my effort today. It’s a work in progress. I’m going to add a few details tomorrow. The top page shows my Wikipedia reference photo and a practice sketch. I used a water soluble graphite pencil for the sketching and M Graham and Creta gouache for the painting. I’m intimidated by gouache, but I love it. When I’m painting I feel the same excitement I felt as a kid doing a really messy finger painting.

The Final Five Pages of My Children's Picture Book

I’ve placed all of the images into my 40-page picture book. There are 10 more pages that I didn’t account for when I started this project: six pages of front matter and four pages of back matter. That’s a lot of white pages to fill with details like the title page, copyright page, frontispiece, end notes, and a blank final page for the publisher’s barcode.

I’m still tweaking the text bubbles…some of them are ugly and distracting. And, now that I have the whole piece completed, I can see that some images, even after my adjustments, still need some more room between the subjects and the outside cut line.

Here’s a screenshot of the final five pages in InDesign. Next step, after a few final touches to the text and crowed images, will be figuring out how to generate a publishable PDF.

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Two Pages Closer to the End

I completed two pages today. The images happened to be, accidentally, almost square. I had minimal editing to do — increasing the canvas size by 200 pixels to create a bleed area. I can see that some of the text boxes are cutting awkwardly into the characters. I’ll have to adjust them.

Getting close to the end means, getting ready to move on to the actual publishing of the book. When that time comes, I’ll go back to figuring out what kind of PDF will be acceptable to Ingramspark.

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Adding Eight More Pages to My Children's Book

My original plan was to create a 32-page children’s book. Thirty-two pages is pretty much the standard length, so I created 38 images and edited the book down to 32 pages. When I discovered that the print book would require 5 or 6 pages of front matter (title page, copyright page, frontispiece, etc), I thought about keeping the 32-page length by removing five images and doing some rewriting. However, that plan made me sad. Instead, I decided to create a 40-page book that keeps all of my original images and text and adds one more realistic painting of a Steller’s Jay, which Jimmy Jay is, and a realistic painting of a Monarch butterfly, which Buddy Butterfly is, with perhaps a little information about them.

Today I managed to complete one more page. The bleed lines show where the pages will be trimmed. By extending the image into the bleed area, there won’t be any white space at the edges of the page when the printer (Ingramspark) creates the bound version of the book. There is, however, a white margin along the spine — that’s where the book will be glued in. The white margin on the inside of the page is one of Ingramspark’s official requirements.

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Al Fresco Art Club, September 1, 2019 -- 30 Days Without Digital Art

Today the Al Fresco Art Club posed this challenge: to do all drawing and painting using only traditional media for the next 30 days. If your work requires using digital tools, you can use them. However, for personal art, we can use only traditional media. I’m going to focus on learning the basics of painting with gouache. Today I turned my gaze to one of my favorite paintings, Cézanne’s Farmhouses near Bellevue (1892-1895). When I did a search to find more information about this painting, I found that it’s also know by the name Fields at Bellevue. I suspect that names is an incorrect translation, but I can’t prove it.

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Chore Day, Aug 31, 2019: Bernie the Buddhist Dachshund hears noise in the chimney

As I wrote the title for this post, I thought, Damn, I’m good — I broke every SEO “best practice” possible: vague title, nothing about the children’s book, no informative keyword that a search engine can make any sense of. It’s highly unlikely that any search engine will index this page in a way that would lead anyone looking for a diary of creating a children’s picture book. The thing is, I really don’t want to spend my time thinking about SEO. I have more interesting things to do. So it goes.

Today was my chore day, with the same chores as last Saturday: cooking for my furry friends and cooking enough food for myself so that I don’t have to cook everyday nest week. I made a pot of spaghetti sauce and a pot of curried cauliflower. As usual, I listened to my favorite Hair Metal bands while I was cooking. There’s only one chore that I didn’t enjoy: cleaning the food processor. The plastic top and complicated locking mechanism are nearly impossible to clean.

On the art front, I updated my “Bernie hears a noise” image. I extended the chimney and gave it a few twists to make it more fun. As a bonus, I added a pink cat to Bernie’s coffee cup.

Some Days Art Takes a Back Seat

Today I had an appointment with a new doctor at his office in The Big City. In my neck of the woods, the big city is Medford, Oregon. After the appointment I went to Central Art, our brick and mortar art supplies oasis, and bought several tubes of M. Graham gouache, Lamp Black, Ivory Black, Burnt Sienna, Payne’s Grey, Dioxazine Purple, and Hooker’s Green. And a small Mini Sidekick Artbin to hold my gouache kit.

Though I was out and about most of the day, I made time to choose the next landscape image that needs to be edited to fit nicely into my square printed page format. In the image below, I will extend that chimney and fade it away before it reaches the top edge of the page. By doing a fade, I can use this image without going into the bleed area.

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Another Day, Another Inch

I got lucky today — I was able to find one of my original images hidden away on my iPad. It was a fairly large file: 300 MB. I transferred the file from my iPad to my desktop computer by uploading the image to iCloud. My internet connection has a sluggish upload speed of 1 MB per second. That 300 MB file took five minutes to upload to iCloud, and another minute to download from iCloud to my desktop computer. I hate the Cloud. Such are the miseries of living in the First World.

For this page I divided the text into three bubbles. I avoided using comic-style bubbles with tails by positioning the text over Jimmy and Buddy so that it’s clear who’s doing the talking. I hope it’s clear.

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Soldiering along two inches at a time

Today I got lucky — two images were big enough and square enough to work with the 8-inch by 8-inch format I’m using for the print version of my children’s picture book. The images also work with the 16:10 e-book format. I do have to adjust the text boxes for both formats. The work goes quickly when the images don’t have to be repainted.

As I’m looking at these pictures and writing the text, I’m wondering: what kind of mother/father would read this book to their children? As a kid, I would have been fine with this story. I liked to read about daring rascals who get into trouble, and then get out of it by wit or by luck. I still enjoy picaresque tales like Post Office by Charles Bukowski.

Finally, a day that has granted me the gift of making two inches of progress!

Yesterday's Image Repaired

It took another hour of tweaking to fix this image of Momma Jay discovering Jimmy on the forbidden roof. These fixes aren’t hard — they just take time. The more images, the more time. However, I feel that it’s important to make my best effort to avoid looking like a careless amateur (which I tend to be). This image is 23 out of 32. I expect that some of the next nine images will also need special attention.

I was thinking today that I’ll feel much closer to the end this book on the day that I buy ISBN numbers for from Bowker. Bowker is the only vendor of ISBN numbers in the United States, which means they can charge whatever they want. I’ll need two numbers: one for the print book and one for the e-book. They are pricey. One ISBN cost $125. A batch of 10 numbers costs $295. If I can write 50 books a year, I could buy 100 numbers for $575. The real bargain is 1000 ISBNs for $1500. To my eyes, Bowker has the same kind of monopoly over ISBNs that Network Solutions once had over domain names. Before they rules changed and selling domain names became competitive, Network Solutions could get away with charging $65 a year for a single domain name.

Here’s the repaired image as it looks in the PDF exported from InDesign. You can tell that this is an even numbered page by the white spine margin on the right of the image.

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