May 15, Also a chore day

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The diners, Willy and Nacho, admiring the chef’s Michelin star technique

Lots of chores this week. Because I’m having eye surgery tomorrow (Monday), I have to get a head start on the workflow of my part-time job. I spent most of this morning loading two days of work into the system so that it can be released automatically Monday evening and Tuesday evening. I should be able to work by Wednesday, if all goes well.

Besides preparing stuff for my job, I did some cooking for next week’s fine dining. The main dish was a vegan “loaf”, what some vegans would call a “no-meat loaf”. I prefer to simply call it a loaf. My loaf is actually a kind of moist bread made with oatmeal, walnuts, quinoa, and kidney beans. Beside the loaf, I made a tomato sauce and a cheese-y sauce. There I go — breaking my own rule. I use cheese-y because it’s a lot easier than saying onion, red bell pepper, and nutritional yeast based sauce.

Pages 4 and 5 with Text Bubbles

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Last night’s sleep was restless. I was dreading the task of doing my taxes. . Fortunately, all went as well as taxes can go. I will sleep better tonight.

This picture is a two-page spread populated with text bubbles. I’m trying to avoid the huge blunder I committed in the first two books…drawing the images with complete disregard for the text. This time I’m keeping all of the important content within the safe area margins. The margin lines won’t appear in the final pdf.

My Bedtime Reading

Pyramid, by David Macauley. It’s about how pyramids are built. All of the illustrations are meticulously crafted pen and ink works of amazing detail. .

Down the Chimney and Cognitive Dissonance

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Today I added some color to the chimney. I’ve been painting this chimney for almost a year and I can’t even say what color it is. So, I painted it brick red. I figure that I’m allowed to take liberties with the cover image, adding extra details that won’t appear in the book, but I don’t want the cover to be so different that is creates cognitive dissonance. I don’t want readers to say as the get into the book,, “Hmmm. It seems that the chimney looks different on every page! And Jimmy’s shirt is different every time I see him!”

Note to future self: create a page with showing the specific colors for all of the objects in the book: t-shirts, cars, shoes, belts, houses, chimneys…everything. And refer to it religiously.

A High Level View of My Children's Book

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When I stitch together thumbnails of all of the pages in my children’s book, I get a global view of the entire project. I can see the overall flow of the story without considering the text, which is simply displayed as black bars. I realize now that I should have worked on this flow view right from the beginning. I did have a storyboard, but I see now that it’s a good idea to get the storyboard right before plunging in to drawing and painting. I’m going to live and learn…and do more work on the storyboard when I do the next book in this series.