I’m on the verge of buying a package of 10 ISBN numbers for $295. But I want to be able to create my own barcode images. Bowker charges about $25 each on top of the $295. I call this the bowker tax. It seems a little greedy.
I found al alternative: The Online Barcode Generator. It looks good, and it’s free.
In other news, I added a drop shadow to the book’s title text.
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.
I had a few moments today to play with the brightness and color saturation of my book’s cover image. I’m tweaking the colors to see if I can get the figures to pop out of the page a little. I’m wondering if I have already overworked this image. Is it time to cool my jets a little? Is it time to self-edit?
BTW, look at the Futura font’s awesome question mark: ?. That’s awesome.
Today I assembled the cover image for my children’s picture book. The colors are all tentative. I love the clouds, which were painted with my Procreate cloud brush.
This is a large image: 8000x4000px. Procreate allows a maximum of 12 layers. That’s not too bad, but if I were doing this image on my desktop I would have 5 times that many layers. Using Procreate with large images requires caution — there’s a of merging layers. Once you merge, you can’t revert. Merging layers is living dangerously.
Just got off the phone with the department manager at my day job. He told me that the company is “rightsizing” itself by eliminating 40% of the products I’m responsible for. I’m bummed. Over the last few years I’ve taken a 20% cut, then another a 15% cut, and now a 40% cut. It’s death by a thousand slices, or more drastically, death by three big slices. All is not lost — I’m optimistic about the future. I’ll have more time to devote to my career creating books.
I started painting the backdrop for my cover image before I got the bad news. I like the work I did today. Enough said.
Today I arranged all of the individual images of my characters into a single image. I shrank Bernie and Uncle Jonny and moved them into a new line of action that converges with the main flow of characters. The two lines of action converge on Jimmy Jay and then plunge down the chimney and into the book itself.
The screenshot shows the Procreate page with a 500px grid. The yellow lines are not going to be in the final picture, of course — they help me visualize the position of the characters reaching limbs. The lavender line represents the spine area. I can see that Jimmy’s feet are too close to the spine. I need to move Jimmy a little to the right. I’ll do that tomorrow.
I want all of my children’s book’s characters to be on the cover. At first I had Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly, then I had Jimmy alone, then I had Jimmy and Momma Jay. Eventually I decided to have everyone on the cover except Buddy Butterfly, who can’t be on the cover because he’s foolishly fallen down the chimney and is out of sight. Today I sketched and painted Uncle Jonny, the Buddhist Steller’s Jay. He’s wearing that fabulous saffron monk’s robe, and he looks very cool.
Here’s Jonny!
I’ve redrawn and repainted the main characters and tonight I’ve composed them into a flowing stream of critters flying through the air. But, now that I pronounce this composition complete, I’m thinking of adding two more characters: Bernie the Buddhist dachshund and Uncle Johnny the Buddhist Steller’s Jay. It would be delightful (for me) to have all of the book’s characters on the book’s cover. Brilliant idea! I tell myself. I’ll do it!
Bernie the Buddhist Dachshund is one of my Deadbeat Club characters. I love that gentle Buddhist dachshund.
Today I added the line work for the cover image’s background layer. I want the background to be a little fuzzy. I outlined the house, the chimney, and the trees with a coarse graphite-like brush to keep the lines softer than the sharp lines of the characters. Eventually I’m going to paint the background in daubs of impressionistic color and add the layer of line work on top using a multiply mode.
Check! Daily inch of progress completed.
I’m stumped, stuck in the mud, bamboozled, confounded, and bewildered. This time my befuddlement is about the background painting for the cover image. Up to this point I haven’t thought much about what a background’s function is. Like most consumers of art, I didn’t really have to think about backgrounds at all — I experienced them viscerally. But now that I have to create a meaningful background to support the message of my children’s book, and I’m getting off to a rough start. What you see here is the result of one hour’s thought. I furiously created half a dozen backgrounds and deleted them all. Out of frustration I got out a spatter brush and came of with today’s inch of progress, which hopefully will inspire tomorrow’s inch.
