As expected, I cooked up some veggie burgers for my pug. I should mention that I did more weed whacking, and then the laundry. In other words, the same chores as last week. But, I got done a little early and had time to read. I’m currently re-reading Nausicaä by Hayao Miyazaki. He’s a master of pen and ink. I attempted a copy of one of the simpler images in the 1,800 page book.
Now that I’ve completed the images and text for my children’s picture book, and caught the typos, I’m working of validating my ePub file. I tried an online validator that required me to upload my entire eBook, all 75MB of it. It passed. The site claims to immediately delete the files one they’re validated. I hope that’s true. In a suspicious moment, I thought, “Are they going to steal my book?”
With that doubt gnawing at me, I decided to validate all future ePubs myself using the EPUBCheck program available on Github. EPUBCheck is the official ePub validator used by publishers. To run it on my Mac, I had to install Java. I went to the Oracle site and downloaded Java. After I installed Java. The next task was to compile the EPUBCheck program, which requires Maven, which I installed using the Brew package manager for Mac.
brew install mavenOnce Maven was installed I could compile epubcheck by running a few commands in a terminal.
mvn clean installOnce EPUBCheck was compiled, I could finally validate my ePub file and recored any errors in the epub-errors file.
java -jar epubcheck.jar ~/Documents/eBook-v2.epub 2> epub-errors
My book passed all tests. I feel that InDesign did a good job of exporting a very complicated ePub 3 file. I’ve looked far and wide and I can’t find a free, open source software that can compile an ePub3 file.
In other news, I sketched another poster today, this time it was the awesome “Nord Express”(1927), by Cassandre. Here’s the original poster.
And here’s my version in pencil and ballpoint pen. Using the ballpoint pen was a definite mistake, another live and learn moment.
23/365
I’m in search of a style. I know I prefer pen and ink, but within the realm of pen and ink, I’m unresolved. Is it dip pen and ink, or Rapidograph or brush pen and ink? Is the color added with watercolor or marker? Should I hatch everything — I truly love to hatch? In fact I hatch until the hatch lines consume my drawing and there’s nothing left but blackness.
When I found Lilla Rogers Creative Bug course named “Treasure Hunt Your Artistic Style: a 10-day Challenge”, I signed up thinking that I might be able to get a inch closer to finding my real style. I know I’m just getting started, and I know that it may take years but if I can get one inch closer to my real style, it’s worth trying the course.
The first assignment is to draw 5 favorite things.I chose a Hiroshige book, my Rolleiflex, my iPhone, my EarPods, and my Da Vinci travel brush, all awesome things. I sketched the goods in pencil, inked with a ballpoint pen, and dropped in some watercolor.
The Rollei was the same value as the iPhone screen until I zapped it with Photoshop.
