How's the Book Going, Sarah? (part 2)
The book is going!! I’m very tired! In a stroke of awfully bad timing, my pencils for the book were due a day or two after CAKE Chicago. I managed to finish drawing everything by Friday night before the show! And then I was able to focus only on CAKE for the weekend.
My plan was to spend Monday dropping the illustrated pages into my InDesign document for the book. I went to the Chicago Art Institute, hung out in the member’s lounge and got to work.
I’m not sure why I thought I could do the whole book in one single day! Hubris! I got a little over halfway done with it Monday, and then got through the rest of it on Tuesday night. I sent it off early this morning (Wednesday!)
It’s pretty easy to place imagery into an InDesign file. The problem was that my imagery didn’t always fit my layouts. This happens sometimes if I’m a little lazy or thoughtless, but it also happens when what I wanted to draw to illustrate a panel or a concept changes.
Here’s a quick example. I dropped the penciled art for the Margarita spread into my InDesign file, and there’s all sorts of chaos in how it fits into the text.
Some of that chaos is easy to fix! I can just reposition the text box in InDesign. Some of the chaos, however, requires resizing the art or even redrawing it. So I have to go back into Procreate on my tablet, move things around, and transfer the pages back to my laptop and drop them into the layouts.
This takes a bit of time! And honestly, I think almost every page needed at least a little nudging. Maybe a dozen pages out of 192 didn’t need any alterations. So it took me a while.
But now it’s done!! Look at all my filled in pages!
And it’s off to the publisher for proofreading (which it probably desperately needs). In the meantime, I can get down to colors. I have about 50 pages colored and finished already!
I’ve still got a pretty tight deadline–about six weeks to color about 140 pages. It’s a lot! But color is by far my favorite part of the process, and where I think I do my best visual communicating, especially with food and drink subject matter. It won’t be leisurely, but I really do love this stage of any project. I might need to get one really good night’s sleep before I jump back into colors, though. (>_<) I’m so glad to have reached another huge milestone in this project, but I’m very tired.
Shameless Self Promotion:
There’s another big sale going on at Threadless! $14 Tees + up to 35% Off Everything, extended thru July 7. If you saw me at CAKE and complimented my goose shirt, you can purchase one of your own there!
What I’m into lately:
I have been re-reading Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays, because I somehow convinced my book club to read it for Pride Month. No one else in the club had heard of Chuck Tingle before, and I’m a little worried this will scare them off and get me kicked out of the book club. (o_o;) But dang, I love this book so much. Fingers crossed they enjoy it too.
What Toki’s into lately:
He’s very tired too!! Don’t you know how hard he’s been working lately on his little kitty book project?
