The Final Cover Page and Title Pages for Book 2

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The front matter title page. It now spreads over two pages.

Today I ordered Corel Painter 2021. I want to paint digitally in a traditional manner and Painter does a good job of simulating real paint. This means that I have to study oil painting techniques and apply them to digital painting. I’m not going to do any real life oil painting — it’s way too messy and I don’t have a ventilated studio. My turpentine will be strictly virtual. More about that project in the coming months.

I finalized the title page for my second children’s book. I moved the portraits of the major characters to the back cover and scaled them down a bit. They look comfortable there.

Here’s what the cover page looks like now.

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The cover page for The Butterfly who airlifted his friends over the wall.

The Title Page for My Second Children's Picture Book

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Now that all of the images for the story are finished, I have to create the title page imageand the cover page, which is actually two images, one for the front and one for the back. I like the idea of Buddy admiring his new muscles. They magically grew overnight when some butterfly hormones kicked in and he’s quite enamored of them.

I think I’ll make his wings bigger and fix the proportions of the back wing, then I’ll let it go. Nothing about this picture is set in stone. In all 48 drawing, I’ve never painted Buddy’s wings the same way, not even once. It won’t be any different this time.

Adding Text to the Cover of My Children's Picture Book

Today I added a title to the cover image. Adding text in Procreate works, but it’s clumsy compared to working with text in Photoshop. For one thing, setting font sizes is done with a very touchy slider — if my finger twitched, the font size jumped or dropped by a pixel or two. I looked for a keyboard popup to enter the font size, but couldn’t find one. Any way, Procreate text works. It’s good enough.

Tomorrow I’ll add “By Doukat” and the ISBN barcode.

A 32-Page Book is a 27-Page Book

Children’s picture books usually have 32 pages. This number is arrived at by the way eight-page “signatures” are created by folding two pieces of paper in half to create an eight-page unit. As a consequence, the number of pages in a children’s book is a multiple of eight. There are some 24-page books, and some longer books, such as Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, which has 48 pages.

Initially I assumed that I would have 32 pages to tell my story. As an impatient rookie, I didn’t do my homework — I didn’t consider that a professionally published book has “front matter” that uses five pages for the title page, a page for the ISBN, publication date, blank pages, and publisher information. Without these pages, the book lacks the fundamental features of a serious book.

Since I don’t want my readers to think I’m a hack, or worse, a lazy, sloppy, hack, I’m going to bring my book up to a professional level. However, adding five pages for front matter gives me a 37-page book. I’ll have to cut five pages of text and images. Despite the extra work I have in front of me, I’m relieved that my book will look like it was done with care and attention to detail.

In the image below (from inDesign), you can see that the story in a 32-page book actually starts on page six.