Book launch – save the date!

We are launching Dream Boats on June 13, 2013 at 7:00 pm at Christianne’s Lyceum of Literature and Art, 3696 West 8th Avenue, Vancouver.

Both author Dan Bar-el and I will be in attendance.

The event is open to all, so drop by to celebrate with us, hear about the book, say hello, or ask us about the story or illustrations – we’d love to see you!

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Book launch – save the…date, check back soon for details!

There are plans in the works for a launch of Dream Boats. I can’t tell you when and where it’ll be, yet, but I know there will be one soon somewhere in Vancouver. If you’re interested in attending, please check back here in the coming weeks, or subscribe to the blog through the links at the bottom of the blog, to find out details as soon as they’re posted.
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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Four Years and 3 Months

I published my very first blog post on this book illustration process on January 10, 2009. Exactly four years and 3 months later I have a finished, final book in my hands.

This was a very long, very exhausting journey but I am so pleased with the printed book; my publisher took a lot of care with the production, and I couldn’t be happier with the final result.

Here’s a little tour of the book, after the jump:

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Dream Boats | Cover

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Endpapers

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Night falls fast under galloping hooves

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Chameleon tests the solidity of newly created land

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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One of my favourite memories is of my dad taking me out ‘frog hunting’ on warm, late spring nights when I was about 4 or 5. Outfitted in rubber boots and armed with a flashlight and my handmade net, we’d walk to the very back of our field, and then out into the overgrown fairgrounds beyond, lured by the chorus of frogs. We’d sneak up to a ditch or pond, trying to escape the frogs’ notice – and if they did hear us and go silent, we’d wait, and wait, not moving, hardly breathing until the first, brave tentative ‘ribbit’ set off the chorus again. Then we’d shine the flashlight into the water and try to catch a glimpse of them before they disappeared under water. I never caught anything, but that really wasn’t the point. Those were exciting, magical evenings for a little girl, out in the dark, way past her bedtime, in a landscape breathing with new life, and surrounded by the heralds of spring.

Gennady Spirin is one of my favourite illustrators. I love, love, love the detail and colour, and minerally paint texture in his washes, and the lovely over-drawing. His artwork makes me want to simultaneously give up, and keep trying harder. His newest book is called Frog Song, so I have two really great reasons to go out and purchase a copy - two copies, actually. One for me, and one for a little girl I know who loves animals and science and is now about the same age I was when my dad used to take me out searching for frogs.

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How gorgeous is this detail?

I found out about this book through an article on Seven Impossible Things, which is accompanied by some beautiful page spreads (click them for gorgeous, large versions).

Much has changed since my childhood. The frog-full abandoned fairgrounds, once a place of overgrown thickets of wild roses; the hunting grounds of coyotes, fox, barn owls, and red-tail hawks, crisscrossed with duck-weed-green, clay-bottomed ditches; the home of frogs, sticklebacks and water skaters, has been bulldozed, levelled, drained and turned into sports fields.

We Got A Star!

This was a pleasant surprise; Dan and I got a really nice (starred) review for Dream Boats in the April 2013 edition of Quill and Quire.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Some excitement!

My publisher delivered this to my door.

This is not quite the final, done book, but it’s pretty close. It’s a bound digital proof, so things like the cover varnish, and the endpapers aren’t quite as they’d be in their finished form, but it’s given me a really good idea of what the book will look like in the end.

I’m really happy with the colour, and the print quality, and I’ll share a few not-quite-real-book images herebwhile I eagerly await the arrival of the very real thing.

I’m actually a little scared to look it over too closely in case I find mistakes I made. It’s kind of a given that I’ll find more than a few I-would-have-done-that-differenties or why-did-I-do-thats, but that’s all good, and part of the process and I should worry if I don’t find things I know I can do better now.

(note: there’s a bit more contrast in these photographs than what you’d see in actual book).

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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Further Proof

A few weeks ago I reviewed the second round of proofs for Dream Boats, including the fold and gather (pictured above).

Printed proofs are so, so, so very important. It’s written in my contracts that I am to receive, review and sign off on proofs before the book goes to print, but the crazy thing is this is only the third book where I’ve actually received a full set of proofs to review. Sometimes I’ve recieved a page, other times nothing. Proofing is costly in time and money, so every so often it gets ‘forgotten’ with sometimes disastrous results.

It is heartbreaking to spend a huge chunk of time on a project, only to open the book for the first time and see over-exposed, low resolution, or blurry images. Often the only reward for illustrating picture books is a nicely produced final product, so when it’s a dud, it can feel like a complete waste of effort and time – months to years, depending on illustration style and working speed.

Since there is no physical artwork to compare the prints too, the proof process for Dream Boats was extremely important. The first round was looking a little too green, the second round looked pretty good – it appeared that the printers in Singapore were indeed able to to decipher my rambling, chicken-scratch colour notes on the first version.

As I mentioned in the previous post on the first round of proofs, there is something about print that suddenly makes the typos and punctuation errors stand up and dance. Sometimes things slip through to the next round, like stubborn grammatical boxers. Major props to editors, I could not do that job. I think my heart would give out. There have been enough times when I’ve sat up in bed with an out of the blue thought such as “did I forget to change all instances of that character’s shirt to blue?”.

And now it’s too late for changes – this book has gone to print..

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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If you’re interested in more stories (and invaluable information) about how kids books authors and illustrators got their start in publishing and what they’ve learned along the way, there is a whole Publishing Plunge series created by the (also very funny) Tanya Kyi, that focuses on the publishing experiences of other CWILL BC members.

Ozalid proofs

Caggages and Ozalids

I have to admit, there is something pretty terrifying about print. Make a mistake, and it’s permanent. You can look something over, and over, and over on screen, or on crummy black and white print-outs, and still you’ll find more mistakes in the colour proofs.

When I was 4, I was delighted to find a spelling mistake in one of my picture books had been carefully pasted over with a correction printed on a small rectangle of paper. Of course I had to unstick one side to see what was underneath (caggage). This little mistake gave me a sudden glimpse into the mysterious process of how books come to be – it was proof of human hands, human process. It was a huge realisation to me and I loved it. I wanted to know more about the poor soul who had to carefully cut and paste those little rectangles correctly spelling the word ‘cabbage’. Sadly, the rest of the glue holding that little piece of paper perished over time and the correction has slipped out of the book and become lost.

When I’m nearing the end of the illustration process, I’m usually pretty exhausted and this book was an extreme. So some things get left at good enough in order to meet a deadline, even though they nag at the back of my mind. When they’re suddenly there in front of me in proof form, after a few months break from the work, they jump right out at me and I know they need to be fixed. Fortunately, there were a few text edits at this point, so it meant I could also do those tiny illustration tweaks at the same time. I might be the only one to notice, but it has stopped bothering me.

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Ozalid proofs + the book dummy

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Ozalid proofs + my illustration notes-to-self  (some things just aren’t that noticeable on screen and it takes a printout to show where there might be a dark fleck, or star, in the illustration that falls under a bit of text, creating confusion etc).

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Ozalid proofs with my colour notes for the printer, for which they will probably grumble at me (I’m sure my comments would be fantastic fodder for a similar poster series. The irony is not lost on me.)

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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This is it, my first quick glimpse…4 years after the first exploratory sketches, and after many, many late nights and working-weekends the day has finally come, I have that first proof of Dream Boats. This is more exciting than I can properly express here.

I had just a quick look at it at the booth at the ALA and it’s now sitting on my dining room table waiting for daylight so I can get a proper look at the colour.

Despite the excitement, the process won’t truly be over until I have the final copy in my hands.

This is the first book that I’ve both illustrated and designed, so it is an extra thrill seeing it in print for the first time. So far, so good. But I’m looking forward to daylight when I can give it a proper looking over.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work in progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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