Chore Day, Oct 26, 2019 -- Book Cover Prototype
/This week’s chores were a ditto of last week’s — cooking lots of food. There was one difference this week: I made an extra batch of oatmeal cookies. To improve them over last week’s cookies, I added three tablespoons of date sugar to balance the bitterness of the unsweetened dark chocolate chips. They turned out to be perfectly addictive. The real benefit of these cookies is that they’re 100% whole grain, and there’s no added oil. As a former fat-eating, meat-eating, dairy-eating Standard American, I’m amazed that I love these cookies.
Now that I’ve got my day job project straightened out, I’ve resumed working on the cover image for my children’s book. I’ve been puzzling over this image for weeks — I knew that it had to be filled with details, showing as many of the book’s characters as possible, and it had to be dramatic. I finally decided that Jimmy had to be jumping down the chimney. After all, what’s more dramatic than someone deliberately jumping down an insanely scary chimney for no apparent reason?
After some tinkering, first with pencil and paper, then by photographing the image with my iPad and editing it with Procreate, I came up with something sufficiently dramatic — everyone is flying in pursuit of Jimmy, including the two mice, with Jimmy just about to enter the chimney’s maw. If it seems odd that mice can fly, remember that anything is possible in Jimmy Jay’s world. Here’s the image I’m working on.
