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 Image Is Now the Cover Page Image

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The white rectangle is reserved for the ISBN bar code.

The “finished” title page is now the cover page. I decided to to expand the title page to double width and use it for the front and back cover. The spine will cut off the tip of Buddy’s right wing. However, when the reader opens the book and lays it face down, they will see the image in all its seamless majesty.

For the title page, I’m going to extract parts of the cover image with most details removed. The title text should be the big feature of the title page.

The Cover Image Installed in the Ingramspark Cover Page Template

It took me a while to decide which font I wanted to use for the titles of all of the books in the series based on the adventures of Jimmy Jay and his pals. I settled on a tall compressed font with classic serifs: Apple Garamond. All caps text can get weird, but this compressed font is distinctive because it has some nice wide letters, like the “D”, that shows a jaunty spirit.

APPLE GARAMOND

Here’s my Ingramspark cover page template populated with my cleaned up image.

The ISBN barcode was provided by Ingramspark’s template generator. The barcode should not be resized. It’s usually placed in the lower right of the back page, but, theoretically, it can be located anywhere on the back of the cover.

Chore Day, Nov 9, 2019 -- Re-inking Momma Jay

Chore day is pretty much the same from week to week — more baking and food prep for the week ahead. I spent about 6 hours cooking tasty bean and sweet potato burgers for my canine companions, and some Bolognese sauce for myself. While I had the stove and oven cranked up, I made a pot of delicious vegetable broth, two dozen chocolate chip cookies, the Bolognese sauce, and a dozen muffins. And, I made a batch of humus.

On the Art Front, I spent some time on my children’s book cover page. The problem is that the line work for Momma Jay was drawn with a pencil, and the rest of the characters were inked with a pen. Momma Jay looked out of place among the sharp lines of the other figures. When I look at this picture from a distance, I see a problem with the weight of some of the lines. I’ll fiddle with this again tomorrow.

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Still Working on the Cover Page, This Time It's Our Hero, Jimmy Jay

Here’s my rendition of Jimmy Jay about to enter the chimney. I can see from the look on his face that he’s a determined bird on a mission. When I combine all parts of the picture into the master image, his mother will be trying to grasp his leg to stop him, and behind her, Jenny Jay will be smiling enigmatically, while behind her will trail the mysterious Argyle Twins, the two suit-wearing mice who can fly without wings.

My next task is to work on a background layer worthy of all of this excitement.

Populating the Cover Image with All of the Characters in the Book

Rather than restrict the cover image to simply Jimmy jumping down the chimney, I’m going to make the cover a group picture that shows all of the characters. That will be Jimmy Jay, Jenna Jay (his sister), the two hitchhiker mice (I don’t know their names yet, but I think they’re definitely hobos), Momma Jay, Bernie the Buddhist Dachshund, and Uncle Johnny. Even though Buddy Butterfly has fallen down the chimney and is out of sight, I’ll have him popping up through a hole in the page saying something like, “What about me?!” It will be cute, I promise.

The other question I’ve been thinking about is the age range for the book. With children’s books you have to declare the ages the book is appropriate for. I think the ages 8 and up sounds right.

Here are the two hitchhiker mice. I wonder what their story is?

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