A Meditative Moment with the Frontispiece Image

I’m feeling cranky and burnt out today. Yet another day spent bailing water from a sinking boat (my ever evaporating day employment) where I’m creating a masterpiece that will be seen just one time, and an hour spent double-checking my children’s picture book for typos (yes, I found another bunch). I’m stunned that I can create so many errors in a story with only 150 words. So, I’m letting myself be cranky — cranky enough to let my characters get a little cranky, though I will remove their gratuitous speech bubbles when I come to my senses.

Learning InDesign Basics

Through my day job I have access to Lynda.com. I found a course called “InDesign: Creating Fixed-Layout EPUBS”. It’s a three-hour course that targets what I need to do with InDesign: create an EPUB. It’s a course that would have saved me many hours of frustration.

Today was a balmy, sunny day perfect for a Vitamin D Club outing. As the other member of the club basked in the sun, I retired to the shade and did some doodling…rough doodling of what’s supposed to be a Jaybird and a Monarch butterfly on the wing to Mexico. I’m thinking of my next book.

Creating a frontispiece image for a children's picture book

One of the pictures I’m repainting is the frontispiece image. The frontispiece is one of the front matter pages that precedes the content. It’s usually a picture that captures the overall feeling of the book. My original cover image will become the frontispiece, and I’ll do a new front and back cover images. It’s originally a picture of Jimmy Jay leaning against the feared chimney; the new version will be Jimmy and Buddy leaning against the chimney.

It’s a work in progress. I’ve been sketching on this picture for three days in an effort to get some good body language going. The fact that Buddy Butterfly is a flying insect with 10 appendages doesn’t make it any easier. Yes, he has two arms, four legs, and four wings. I’m not complaining — he’s my anti-hero and I’ll own up to creating him.

This is definitely a work in progress. The first edit was to flip the image horizontally to get the position of the chimney to match the rest of the pictures in the book. I haven’t got them right yet.

This was going to be the cover page, but now it’s going to be the frontispiece image,

Feeling Low Key

Today is a low energy day. I didn’t move an inch forward today, at least not by drawing or editing or working with inDesign. I feel weird, as if I’m unemployed. When I’m feeling like this — kind of overwhelmed, really — I like to sketch and do lots of hatching.

I’m in the foul mood partly because I’m physically tired, and partly because I made the big mistake of looking at other illustrators’ books. I found the makingpicturebooks.com site and started browsing through some of the incredible work from illustrators around the world. It was inspiring for a moment, then it became an enormous downer. My brain went off on the wrong track and started playing a horrible comparison game that goes somethings like this:

“Wow! They’re good, really good. Your stuff, it’s you and that’s a good thing, but wow! They’re great. Too bad you got such a late start with art and have so much learning to do. Oh, well…Good for you for even trying! Art is long and life is short, so it’s great that you got started at all. I know you’re doing your best, but damn! Look at the great stuff those thousands of illustrators are cranking out…blah, blah, blah.”

Those thoughts have me rattled. When I try to calm down by meditating, I have to fend off those voices coming at me from all directions. I have to remember not to look into the Palantir (that’s a reference for TLOTR fans).

I did this sketch in the raw vegan deli on Main Street. Time, 20 minutes. For kicks, I posed my self-portrait on top of my Thinkpad.

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July 17, 2019 — Raw Self-portrait with hair as it was 20 years ago

Choosing a page size for a picturebook

One detail I didn’t consider for my picturebook was the size of the pages and shape of the pages. I initially hadn’t planned on doing a print version — I assumed that customers would be buy e-books for their iPads.

iPads have a 4:3 aspect ratio, rather square compared to Kindle Fire’s 16:10, and much more square than standard HD 16:9 screens you see on laptops. What looks good on an iPad is going to look dopey on a Kindle Fire, and vice versa. eBookPartnership suggests creating two versions: one for iPads and another for 16:10 and 16:9 devices. Each version would require images designed to fit the resolution of the screen, its own ISBN, and time and effort to make both versions look good on their respective devices.

So, I’m going to be practical I’m going to use the square print version for the e-book. As you can see in the illustration below, the square format will look okay on the iPad, but it will suck on the long/wide screen of the Kindle Fire. Two out of three is good enough for me.

The square page format as it will appear on your iPad or your Kindle Fire

The Lessons You Learn When You Create Your First Picture Book!

One lesson I’ve learned, after drawing and painting Buddy Butterfly several dozen times is this: plan and simplify your detailed characters before you start drawing. Even though I did some character sketches at the beginning of this project, I didn’t anticipate that drawing a butterfly with a segmented body and delicately veined wings would create a major time management problem. When I look at my images with dozens of flowers, trees with variegated coloring, skies with lacy clouds, butterflies with exactly 44 segments for all four wings, I realize why cartoons do not have crazy details in them — they take too much time.

Lesson learned. I’m curious to see how well I apply my brilliantly obvious insight to my next picture book, which will be done with pen and ink! But I’m getting distracted with future thinking. I’m going back to work now. I’ve still got 20 more pictures to color this week!

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Picture #11, Jimmy and Buddy having lunch in the poppy patch

Today I started my new crusade to draw from life at least one hour, once a week. For the last 6 months I’ve been drawing from imagination — cartoon birds and butterflies for my children’s picture book. At the same time I’ve been simultaneously reading about Vincent van Gogh and Michelangelo. The more I learn about them, the more I understand the importance of drawing from life. I want to improve my draftsmanship, so I’ll be spending time every Sunday sketching living things.

My first goal is to overcome my fear of drawing foliage. I decided I should start my new regiment by sketching the garden shed. It’s half covered by a lush grapevine. An overgrown rosemary bush sits in front of the grapevine and the shed. I’m confronted with thousands of leaves. After a few minutes eye to eye with the grapevine, I realized that I should not try to draw every leaf. Instead, I decided to draw only a few of the tendrils and leaves. Here’s the result of one hour of sketching.

An HB pencil gave a low contrast result, so I cracked the Photoshop Linear Burn whip to adjust the values to equivalent of a 4B pencil.

On the other end of the art spectrum, here’s today’s digitally colored picture for page #11, in which Jimmy and Buddy are having lunch in the poppy patch. I suppose Buddy is looking for nectar, and Jimmy is might be looking for some disgusting bugs to eat. However, in the world of children’s books, bugs, like birds and butterflies, are really people, so you can’t them. I’d better put a burrito in Jimmy’s hand.

Working in inDesign and Kindle Create

The title says it all — I’m filling up my inDesign template with images. I want to preview the layout and text to see what needs fixing. Despite my efforts to keep the re-inked images in one place, they’re still scattered all over the hellish landscape of iCloud, iPad, desktop, and a dozen different folders. It’s time to make lemonade out of the lemon I’ve been cultivating.

Here’s a sample page previewed in Kindle Create.

Image #9, The Tree House

After the bird house disaster in my front yard yesterday, it’s ironic that I’m re-inking the Jay family’s new tree house. The repair job I did on the bird nest in my Oregon Berry bushes didn’t turn out well. It rained last night and this morning the nest was tilting perilously. It looked crushed and rain-damaged. The original nest was perched high in a stable branch that leaned against the house, and it was sheltered under the eaves of the roof. If I were a Stellar Jay, I would not be happy with the poorly rebuilt nest. I would look for a safer place for my family.

Despite my disappointment in the condition of the nest, I tried to prop it up a little better, just in case my jays return to reevaluate their nest. My only solace is that the birds are healthy and it’s early in the mating season. There’s still time for them to build another nest. I hope.

Doing Laundry, Whacking Weeds, Chopping Down a Tree, Scraping Moss off the Roof, and Painting

The title says it all…that’s what I did today. It’s Saturday and my regular chore is to do the laundry, which I enjoy because I get some unbroken reading and surfing time. I had a lot more to do than laundry. It so happens that Spring is here and all of the trees and weeds have gone berserk. It’s my job to keep them from taking over. Weed whacking is one of my favorite chores, and chopping off a huge limb that was threatening to crush the neighbor’s fence was fun.

With all the excitement going on, I still had a few moments to work on the picture showing Jimmy diving to catch Buddy as Buddy is falling down the chimney. I loaded it into Affinity Photo, scaled it up to 5000x3500, and inked it again. I ran out of time while coloring it, so I’m presenting the half-painted picture.

BTW, this image was exported directly from Affinity Photo on the iPad Pro. For the first time Photoshop was not involved in my workflow.