Refining the Cover Image Characters

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With a big cover image of 8000x4000 pixels, I enough resolution to add some detail to my otherwise cartoonish characters. I figure that the cover image will be printed at 300 DPI or higher, making even mintue details like eyelashes crisp and visible. I can imagine a reader poring lovingly over the image and noticing Momma Jay’s eyelashes, or noticing that the two brown mice are wearing argyle socks. In the picture below I’ve extracted the Momma Jay charter from the cover picture so that I can work on the image without distractions. The trick will be to maintain her proportions so that she’ll look right when I paste the her back into the main image.


Chore Day, Oct 26, 2019 -- Book Cover Prototype

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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.

8000x4000px Cover Image for Children's Picture Book

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Since my children’s picture book will be printed as an 8x8-inch square, I need an image that is two 8-inch squares side by side, with a bit of extra space for the bleed and for the spine. I decided to create an 8000x4000px image. Procreate will allow 12 layers for an image that size. I could have made a smaller image — say 6000x3000px — but I want to make sure that I have lots of headroom pixels to play with. With an 8000x4000-pixel image, I could conceivably go up to 26-inches square — that would be a hella big children’s book. However, for my purposes, having the extra resolution means that I won’t have to redraw this image to increase the resolution.

I started roughing out the image today. I used the camera in my iPad to take a picture of the thumbnail, then I the photo into Procreate. Once there, I scaled it up to fit the 8000x4000 image. I’ll have to figure out how to fit the title text on the page, that’s for sure.