News from the Studio

I've been so incredibly busy this past month. So busy, that I haven't been able to post here on the blog. My manuscript for my next book Crafting A Patterned Home came back to me after I re-wrote things in January. I had a week to turn it around this time. This is the last time I will see it until after the copy editor reviews it and I have to answer questions about it. It's a big hurdle I just got over and I am relieved. I think it is reading nicely. I hope you all will like it.

Next, I had to pump out about 76 illustrations for the book. I was given a week to do it. First, I do pencil sketches on tracing paper. I transfer them to watercolor paper using a light box. I hand-paint them with gouache. 

That is the fun part. Then they had to all be scanned. During a snow day, I taught Julia how to scan and she scanned almost all of them for me while I kept painting more. We have had a lot of snow and school has been called off and started late. One week Julia only went to school one day due to illness and snow. Good thing I had work for her. 

After scanning, I bring each of them into Photoshop, fix the color, tweak them some more and cover up mistakes, then re-size them for the publisher to drop into the book layout. It is a lot of work. It used to be that I would do the illustrations and ship them off to the publisher and they would do all of the work for turning them into art ready for the book. Now it is up to me to do that for them. Progress? I didn't actually get them all done in a week but I got them all done pretty done close to the deadline. Success.

Next up, after the illustrations, I had to draw all the templates for the different projects in Adobe Illustrator. Templates are different than illustrations. They are like a pattern piece and are printed as line art in black and white - no color. The process for this part of the book project is that I put each piece on my scanner, cover it with a white sheet, scan it, and then bring the scan into Illustrator. I use the scan to draw over and turn it into line art. 

There were a lot of templates for this book project. Here's a pile of some of them. 

Next week is school vacation. Luckily I am caught up with my book deadlines and hopefully will have some down time to spend with Julia and help out at the farm. It is her last February vacation before high school graduation in June. Yikes.