I’ve wanted to do this for years, and having a 3-year-old to do it with gave me the perfect excuse to have a go at making potato stamp holiday paper. Was an easy, quick craft… all you need is a small potato and knife to cut the pattern out of it, a little paint and a flat container to put it in, and large paper. We reused Hera’s old drawings, which added a quirky flare with creepy stick figures peeking through the trees! Hank was too busy practicing crawling up and down off the ottoman to join us ;)

I’ve just started working on illustrating and designing a new children’s book, eeeeeee! Now that the contract was signed, the deposit received, and I’m ready to put pencil to paper, and thought I’d share my process as it’s happening.

1) Setup :  30 minutes
• Printing out copy of contract
• Print out and fill out time sheet
• Print out manuscript
• Set up a folder on my laptop to organize files created and received along the way
2) Analyzing the story : 2 hours
• Reading through the story to determine how much text will go on each page
• Underline key visual imagery to be included in illustration mentioned in story
• Make notes for ideas for imagery I have while reading the story
• Sketch thumbnails of the layout with notes on rough concepts for each spread

3) Gathering Imagery : 30 minutes
• Using Google Images to find imagery to use as reference and inspiration

4) Preparing proof for author : 1 hour
• Scanned any thumbnails
• Created book layout in InDesign
• Inserted the text and scanned images into the layout according to my thumbnails
• Described each page on digital “sticky notes” on each page
• Emailed author a PDF proof of the concepts for review

Time spent so far : 3.5 hours
Materials : pen, 8 pieces of recycled printer paper, ipad, and InDesign on laptop.

Next up over the next couple weeks are more detailed sketches…