by Robbi | May 27, 2013 | Process, Week in Review |
Now that most of The Imaginary Dragon is finished, we spent most of the past week working on small tasks that need to be done but aren’t especially exciting or gratifying. For example, I needed to actually design the liner notes for Drew’s album that we had sketched out earlier (you can see the discussion of that process HERE). You will see that my idea with the title “stacking” below the monster on the cover (as opposed to having one line of the title above the monster and one line below) won out. Even though winning isn’t everything, I like it when I win.
I had to do a few small illustrations (called “spots”) for the inside. Once they were done, I “laid it out” on the computer, which just means I arranged where the words go and where the pictures go:
Then I printed out a bunch of them and made Matthew fold them.
I also had to design the letter that is going to get sent along with the album, so first spent some time drawing Drew and his two boys rocking out, as a way of introducing them to club members. If you don’t already know Drew, well, here’s your introduction:
If you do already know Drew, well, you already know he pretty much spends all day long leaping through fireworks with his kids.
I also had to draw a kiwi for the letter. A kiwi bird, that is. Kiwis look like this:
This kiwi is brokenhearted because he wasn’t included in Archipelago in spite of being from New Zealand (which was included). In fact, I had to draw this broken-hearted kiwi as a mea culpa for having suggested that a bunch of other marsupials that are native to Australia are also native to New Zealand. Wrong! The lesson is: do your research. The other lesson is: don’t believe everything you read in a book.
Once that letter was designed and printed, Matthew folded them as well.
There’s just something I love about repetition. I think that’s why I’ve always liked printmaking and illustration – there’s not just one drawing out there in the world, there are thousands of copies of that one drawing. For some reason I really like that. So I especially liked seeing those letters piled on top of one another:
and that tower of Drew heads just lining up in a gratifying stack. So many Drews!
Once all the letters were folded, we realized we had originally intended to send the CD out in a 5″x7″ envelope, since the CD measures 5″ x 5″. What we forgot is that the letter is too big for that size envelope unless it’s folded again. But a letter folded in quarters looks so sloppy unless you actually designed it to be folded in quarters. Argh! Luckily postage for 6″x9″ envelopes is the same as 5″x7″ envelopes, so we just had to decide what style envelope to get – giant triangle flap, side flap or end flap?
You see what I mean when I said we had to do some little things that aren’t very gratifying? It’s definitely one we spent way too much time on, but came to the conclusion that we should pick the end flap, so it felt more like a “package” and less like a “letter.” Ah, the psychology of letter-opening!
Up next is a website revamp. I hate doing web stuff, but it’s one of the things we have to do because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to sell anything ever. Our current landing page doesn’t have anything about any of the books we’ve actually made for Bobbledy Books, because when we started, we didn’t have any. Funny how that works. Now that we’ve completed a year’s worth of work, we can give people a better idea of what to expect in the future. So, a new landing page is in the works.
Here it is, partly completed:
Don’t worry – it’s not going to be all black. We’re just trying to figure out what image to put in all that black space.
We also were faced with the problem of our growing children. Most notably, August needs an update – he’s hardly recognizable here as a baby:
without his new signature ‘do:
So I had to make a few updates like that as well.
And then finally, last but not least, we had to spend some time being really, REALLY excited about getting our very first book that we’ve published with a big publishing company in the mail:
As much as we enjoy making our own books and sending them out to people, it’s so exciting to have a book published by a real publisher (Chronicle books!), printed in hardcover, that will be lining the bookshelves in real bookstores (not just our virtual bookstore) all over the country. Looking at the final version of the book was such a thrilling moment.
Matthew was so excited, he almost started to cry. Or pee his pants. I can’t tell.
All of this is to say that making books is extra super-duper amazingly great. We love it. Even if it means we spend a lot of time sometimes working on tasks that are small and unimportant and not very gratifying. Because for all of those little tasks, there are the giant, exciting, wonderful payoffs of seeing your book in print.
If you’re interested, you can pre-order Ten Thousand Stories from Chronicle. DO NOTE however, that it isn’t really a children’s book. It’s not not for children, mind you, there’s nothing particularly offensive in it, but there is some darkness and gloom that kids (or parents) might not like.
by Robbi | May 20, 2013 | Process, Week in Review |
This past week my work at Bobbledy Books has almost exclusively been computer work. Although working on the computer doesn’t have the same feel as scribbling away with my pen and ink or swabbing away with my paintbrush, I actually enjoy it because it isn’t the most creative work that I do. Sometimes it’s nice to sit back, click some buttons, move things around, and then undo everything you did just by clicking some more buttons.
It helps a LOT that I have a special computer tablet I can draw directly into Photoshop with using a stylus.
It can’t replace my actual pen and ink (or, I won’t let it), but it does let me take lots of shortcuts.
For each image, I start with a pen and ink drawing I’ve scanned in:
And some watercolor textures I’ve scanned in:
And I start mapping out my drawing filling in basic shapes:
The king and his men are travelling out to the forest by the mountain, so obviously I have to add them in. I also added a clocktower in the foreground to give a better sense of how far away things are from the town:
I also like how the flag on the clock tower helps point you in the right direction.
“IN CASE YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION,” it says, “WE’RE GOING OVER HERE!!!”
I forgot that the king is rushing out to the forest to investigate a fire, so I added some smoke coming out of the trees. I also added another set of bushes in the foreground to frame the picture a little bit more, and put some shadows under the king and his horses.
I placed the shadows so that the horses feet aren’t touching them, which makes it look like they’re in such a rush that they aren’t even touching the ground – like they’re bounding towards the forest. It’s a simple trick that can add a lot of movement to your pictures.
I wanted the big green area to look like a bunch of fields instead of a big, grassy plain. Big, grassy plains remind me of Africa, and this king and his troops aren’t living in Africa. So I added some white lines to divide the land into a patchwork of fields.
It felt like the picture was almost there, but something was missing. Things weren’t quite how I wanted them to be. And then I remembered to add some shadows to the fields. It makes them feel more like hilly fields, doesn’t it?
Finally, I decided to add some more shadowy details to the mountain (to make it look a little more rocky) and to the clock tower (to make it look a little more clocky).
And that’s pretty much it. Of course, this looks very simple to do when I break it down into just a few steps, but it actually takes me kind of a long time to figure out. And I had to do 41 of them (though not all of them were as complex as this one) so needless to say, I was up pretty late a few nights this week!
I also painted last week’s auction item – a cinderella duck running down the stairs:
She’s available to bid on until 12:30 EST TODAY (MONDAY, 5/19!), so if you have a hankering, you can go bid on her HERE.
Each of our books also has a little project in the back two pages, so this time around we decided we would show kids how to make their own pop-up dragon. I learned how to make simple little beak-like pop-ups:
and then drew a dragon around it. I liked it, but didn’t like how beak-y the nose was. I tried to figure out a more squarish way to make the snout, but it didn’t work at all.
And I didn’t like how there wasn’t any room left to draw the dragon’s body (which has the most potential for fun and imagination). So I thought if we turned the page vertically and made a smaller cut, it might work better. I also tried adding some teeth:
I even was able to teach Matthew how to make one, which is the true test of whether this would be a good project for kids. And Matthew’s dragon didn’t disappoint in its weirdness:
So, after a bunch of prototypes, I think we have our winner.
I even tried sticking a crumpled paper towel in my dragon’s mouth, to look like smoke coming out.
I can’t wait to see what kids come up with for their dragon projects!!
All of that prototyping happened in the middle of the night when I was supposed to be painting. But that’s okay. When the creative spirit moves you, you kind of just have to go with it.
So this week I’ll be designing the step-by-step instructions on how to make these pop-up dragons. Matthew still has to actually write the instructions, which is actually really hard. It’s times like this that I’m really glad I’m not the writer.
Actually, I’m always really glad I’m not the writer.
by Robbi | May 13, 2013 | Process, Week in Review |
Last week at Bobbledy Books it was all about painting. Painting, painting, painting. I had completed sketches on the computer and placed them in the general layout:
Then I had inked in each part of each image using pen and ink. For example, on the left side is the dragon:
And on the right are the little vignettes of the dragon doing bad things:
I sometimes mess up inking, so will just redraw the extra bit I messed up on, and then patch everything together in Photoshop. For example, when I drew the princess that the dragon is kidnapping, I accidentally drew her crown too far down on her forehead, so you couldn’t tell what line was the bottom of the crown and what lines were her eyes. And her strands of hair were confusing. And her arm was too short.
So I just redrew the princess, giving her a longer arm and black braids:
Once I painted everything in, I patched it all together in Photoshop:
Isn’t Photoshop amazing? I bet you can’t even tell that I made the fix. At least, I hope you can’t.
I cannot tell you how often I thank my lucky stars that I was born in the age of Photoshop, so I don’t have to redraw and repaint things all the way from the beginning, like people used to have to do. Actually, illustrators used to solve the problem by gluing in a little paper patch over the mistake and just repainting that patch – the analog version of this. But there was lots of sanding of edges and painting of white in very sneaky ways to hide those patches. If you ever have a chance to see some original art by illustrators from any time before 1990, it’s really fun to see the clever ways in which they hide their corrections.
At any rate, all of this is to say I spent lots of time painting this week, and papers were scattered everywhere, waiting to dry and then to be scanned.
Alden kept me company painting:
I’m afraid she fully expects her leaf to be a part of this book.
While I waited for Matthew to scan all of my paintings into the computer, I entertained Oscar, who rarely comes into the studio, but had decided the sun shining on Iggy’s bed was worth a visit.
I also needed to create some more watercolor texture blocks – all of the cutout watercolor shapes in the pictures are actually just cut out in Photoshop. I know, I know – it sounds like cheating, but actually cutting out pieces of paper in the right shapes would take me FOREVER, and you would only get one Bobbledy Book every three years, and that wouldn’t be good. So, some textures are just one color:
And others are multiple colors:
Another secret: it doesn’t actually matter what color they are, because I can adjust the colors in Photoshop. It’s mostly looking for enough variation in the application of paint that it doesn’t look like I cut all of the patches out of the same piece of paper.
So, once I put everything together, it will look something like this:
I still need to do some adjusting on the paper cutouts, and maybe add some line drawing on top of them (I usually do that in white, on the computer). But that’s the general gist. And I have to do that for about 40 images. So it takes a long time. But, I have officially completed the painting in and the placing of the painted pieces – this week I’ll dedicate to placing and adjusting the paper cutouts.
All this is to say – I’m getting closer. The funny thing about any project is that the more you work on it, the closer you get to the end, no matter what. I always find that comforting. Except, of course, at the very beginning of a project, when I’m the farthest from the end that I ever will be. Which is why I try to never think about anything when I’m starting something. But as soon as I’m one minute in, I say to myself, “That’s one minute closer to the end! I did it!” and give myself a big pat on the back. Really, the only way to get through anything is to constantly congratulate yourself. I find it a very useful practice.
So, hooray for me! One week closer to finishing The Imaginary Dragon! I think I’ll treat myself to some ice cream.
by Robbi | May 6, 2013 | Life, Week in Review |
The past week was all about continuing to work on the next Bobbledy Book “The Imaginary Dragon”. Usually when I get to work on a particular project, I kind of dive in and forget everything else. I completely lose track of time (you have no idea how many times I’ve looked up from my work, thinking it’s around 10am, to discover it’s 3:15 and I’m late to pick the kids up from school) and often forget to eat. Matthew does a good job of feeding me snacks and reminding me that it’s time to go to bed. All of this is to say that not much happened on the work front this week other than drawings of dragons.
Last week, Matthew posted some of the early sketches from the book and a few process pictures. He also posted a screenshot of the book layout in InDesign – if you recall, at that point in time, there were lots of pages that didn’t have any illustrations on them, just yellow boxes with notes on what it was I would draw for that page. Well, after a week of drawing away, I’m very pleased to say that all of the sketches for all of the pages are done. No more yellow boxes! Yay!
The funny thing about being a book illustrator is that an image might work perfectly fine by itself, but when you put it next to another image (as you do when putting one image on one page and another on the page opposite) it no longer works. I ran into that trouble a few times, which is always frustrating, because you think you’ve figured things out and it turns out you haven’t.
For example, in one spread, Bill discovers a field of corn on the left hand page, then eats himself into oblivion on the opposite page. Our original layout was supposed to look something like this:
All those stalks of corn were making things look really busy, and really fussy compared to other drawings in the book. I thought maybe I could solve the problem by taking out some of the corn on the left page.
I mostly tried that because I had spent so much time figuring out and drawing all those bent down cornstalks on the right hand page that I didn’t want to do any more work on it. La-zy! Â Matthew pointed out that not only was it unclear that Bill was sniffing the corn on the left, but his arm also was popping out from somewhere totally unrelated to his body. He also pointed out that with all of the cornstalks on the right, I hadn’t left any space for the writing. Adding a white box behind the writing just made things look even MORE busy. So, we had to re-think the spread.
We decided that the close-up row of corn worked, and that we could repeat Bill by letting the corn move across the spread separating the two versions of Bill – one thinking about eating the corn, and the other actually eating the corn. We thought that juxtaposition of corn contemplation/corn frenzy might also be kind of funny.
I was doubly frustrated because I had a terrible time trying to draw Bill crazily snarfing down the corn, but I pushed through and eventually was happy with it. And so went all of the sketches.
Once I’m done sketching, I print out all the sketches and tape them to the backs of watercolor paper. I use pen and ink with a flexible nib, and a lightboard to trace the sketches. Everyone in the world who isn’t an illustrator thinks this is cheating, and everyone in the world who is an illustrator can’t imagine not using a lightboard. I’m a firm believer in doing whatever gets the job done as painlessly as possible.
So, while I’m tracing, I have to spread all the drawings I’ve inked out to dry.
My desk runs out of space pretty quickly, and soon all of the drawings start taking over the rest of the studio.
I only ink the actual drawn parts of the pictures – the cut-out areas of watercolor I do on the computer. So a lot of the drawings I do with the pen and ink are very incomplete and kind of mysterious. What is Bill hiding behind? What is the king waving his scepter at?
And here you can see the inked in version of Bill scarfing down the corn. I like how he turned out.
Matthew then scanned in all of the ink drawings (we scan them in first in case I mess up painting them so I can make fixes in photshop if I need to) – I hate hate hate scanning, so I went and did some gardening with the kids while Matthew scanned everything in and watched Prison Break on Netflix. Yeah, I know. I don’t feel like I missed a thing.
And so, it wasn’t until late Sunday that I was able to get started on painting. We’ve decided that Bill is a pink dragon. It’s hard to be pink, if you’re a dragon. Or maybe it’s just hard to be a dragon, if you’re Bill. Either way, the pink somehow makes him seem a little more hapless, a little less threatening:
And that’s just the way I like my dragons.
by Robbi | Apr 20, 2013 | Kids, Life, Projects, Week in Review |
So, here’s what we did around here this week:
I worked on the design for the upcoming Bobbledy album by Drew. We decided we’re just going to go with a simple 5″x5″ sleeve. Seeing that fewer and fewer people are interested in dealing with CDs, it seemed silly to invest in a big booklet sort of production that people might look at once and toss in the trash, once their CD has been copied over to their iPod. I fondly recall my days of poring over liner notes every time I listened to a cassette on my walkman, but I believe those days are gone.
Though I had worked through most of the design for the front of the sleeve last week, there was still the question of what to put on the back (song list, special thanks, info about Drew, info about us) and how to organize it (painstakingly). We finally settled on this design:
If you are confused by all of the extra gobbledy gook around the design, whenever you design for packaging, you have to design to a template, which is set up how the piece will print. Since this is a little sleeve that will fold in half with the edges wrapping around, you design the back of the sleeve to be on the left hand side of the page, and the front of the sleeve to be on the right hand side. Fold on the orange lines and you’ve got a sleeve. Voila! If you don’t believe me, print it out and try it!
We also had to figure out what to print on the disc. We wanted to keep it simple, so decided on a close-up of the monster face. But then there was the problem of what to do with the title and Drew’s name.
(Again, all that extra writing and weird marks are for the printer’s, so they know exactly how to line up and print out our disc art.) We tried the above one first, but we weren’t really happy with how it lost some of its punch by the face not taking up the entire disc. So we tried again:
Actually, this was the fourth or fifth try. But it did the trick. That face is right in your face, and isn’t undone by the small writing down below.
We like it very much. And it looks pretty good, hanging with Drew:
In other news, I painted some more auction items:
We went on some bike rides:
Doug the Baker got some new chair and table sets for outdoor seating:
Alden assisted in the unpacking:
and the transport:
and Iggy kept the perimeter safe and the cardboard boxes at bay:
We brushed August’s hair, rendering him powerless.
We call this his “Dapper Dan” look. He is not a fan.
We played “Find the Baby”:
And finally, Kato helped make Lemon Kick Pound Cake for the Tang Soo Do bake sale today (Saturday) at the Kingstown Farm Store from 10-2! Come buy some! It’s lemony!!
August helped in the clean-up:
then discovered sour cream:
then enlisted Iggy in the clean-up:
then decided baking cakes wasn’t as interesting as making soup with plastic vegetablestuffs (another favorite pastime around here):
When I say this pound cake is lemony, I really mean it:
(pay no attention to the child passed out on the floor in the background, or the unidentified screw driver on our kitchen counter).
In spite of all the missteps along the way, Kato deemed the whole affair a success:
(on the Kato scale of success, a skeptical single thumb up is about as good as it gets).
We also started to lay out our next Bobbledy Book, tentatively called, “The Imaginary Dragon.” You can read a bit about our brainstorming process over on the Idiots’Books blog, HERE.
We also learned how to Twitter, which is turning out to be the colossal waste of time that we thought it would be. Follow us at @BobbledyDad and @BobbledyMom.
So that was our week.
by Robbi | Apr 13, 2013 | Week in Review |
We’ve decided that it would be nice if we did a weekly update of what exactly we do here at Bobbledy Books. Just a little look into the various projects we’re working on, what being a writer and illustrator and independent book publisher is all about – that sort of thing. We work on so many different projects at any given time that we pretty much forget we’ve done them as soon as they’re done. So, in an effort to remind ourselves – here it is: The Week at Bobbledy Books.
First off, I was in New York City last weekend. I went to attend the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Arts (MoCCA) Festival, which is basically a room full of people making cool books – most of which have pictures and words in them. Usually Matthew and I have a table there and we spend all our time selling books, but since this year Matthew got tickets to the Final Four, we gave up our table to a more deserving and dedicated vendor who would scoff at the idea of passing up a spot at MoCCA to go to the Final Four. The show was great, I forgot to bring my camera, my friend Kenan won an award of excellence for his most excellent Last Train to Old Town comic. Also, and perhaps most importantly, I got to eat some tasty chinese food (the sort that is not to be had in Chestertown), and got this fortune in my fortune cookie:
Well. I certainly wasn’t feeling ready to take on the world. I hung my fortune up with my best fortunes of all time:
I put them on my computer monitor so I can look at them all day long. “You should be able to make money and hold on to it” (I like the “should” construction, as it is true that anyone SHOULD be able to do that). “Your dearest dream is coming true” (surrounded by smiley faces). “Your flair for the creative takes an important place in your life” (nice that they call it a “flair”). “You will make a sudden rise in life” (slightly terrifying). “A good time to start something new” (also surrounded by smiley faces – and received just before Alden was born). “You are offered the dream of a lifetime. Say yes!” (YES!!!).
So, given that my most recent fortune suggested I ought to be ready to take on the world, some life organization was in order. When Matthew returned from Kansas City/Atlanta, we sat down to try to organize our lives. Which meant putting together a schedule.
And printing it up nicely on fancy paper and cutting it out nicely:
This took a whole day, which is exactly why we need a schedule.
Once we got that taken care of, we were feeling much better prepared. Onward!
We decided for the first time ever to take out an actual advertisement in an actual magazine. When we were at AWP, the booth next to ours belonged to Brain,Child magazine – a magazine for mothers that isn’t really a parenting magazine so much as a magazine about parenting (the difference being the marked absence of “Top 10 How-To” lists and an interest in celebrating diverse ways of being a mom). Anyway, we liked the magazine, we liked the folks running it, and we thought we’d dip our toes in the giant muckity lake of advertising with them. So, a good part of last week and the beginning of this week was taken up with designing our ad, which will take up the entire back cover of the summer issue. Wowza! Dipping our toes with a splash!
So – here it is (after much hemming and hawing and many failed attempts…):
Matthew and I worked on this together over the phone while he was still in Kansas City/Atlanta. It’s harder to work that way, but at least no one is breathing down my neck when I’m making lots of bad design decisions. After he got back we did the final tweaks and sent it off to the printer’s on Thursday.
Our next Bobbledy project is going to be the album of music by Drew. He has sent us all of the music files so we know what’s going on the album. But there’s the problem of actually having to name the album. We went through a lot of names – most of them directly from the songs: “Chase the Falafel” – “Roll, Dust Bunny Roll” – “A Perfectly Romulan Day” (edit: Drew just wrote me to tell me that it was supposed to be “A Perfectly Cromulent Day”. See HERE) – “Banana Kazoo” – “Juggle Mosquitos” – “Ground Hog” – “Where Does it Go?” – “Give Abraham Lincoln a Call” – among others. We THINK we’ve finally settled on “I Don’t Wanna Brush My Teeth” (though I am still partial to “A Perfectly Romulan Day”).
And then I started trying to draw something.
Yuck. Hated it. Too mucky. Not terribly interesting.
I liked it, Matthew hated it. I’m a sucker for red, and monsters, but Matthew insisted it was much too hard to read, and then what was the deal with the weird eyeless monster? Also, too much white.
We came up with this idea of the words being broken up by a giant smiling mouth:
Which I also hated but Matthew insisted was good. It felt like the background needed to be a little more deliberate, not just a bunch of flat texture. Inspired a bit by Keith Haring (check out his site for kids – old school but fun), I thought maybe some kind of pattern made up of a bunch of little objects might be fun.
Okay. We were getting closer, but the colors were all wrong and it wasn’t quite there. We tried LOTS of different color combinations.
We finally settled on red and orange, and rearranged the title so Drew’s name could actually be on the album (whoops! how could we have forgotten that?!).
Much better. Then Matthew pointed out that all those shapes stuck together and formed kind of a monster, with his arms up in the air and his legs going to either side of Drew’s name.
See?
Look at that! So my job for next week is to draw all those little orange bits into the shape of that monster. And voila – even though I lost the initial battle of the red monster with no eyes, I still got my red, and I still got my monster. Check and mate.
And the final thing we worked on this week was keeping our flat table clean:
This might be the hardest project of all, but so far this week we’ve been successful. Our desks have suffered, but just waking up and looking over into the studio in the morning to see that clean flat table makes us both feel ready to take on the world.
Here’s hoping next week is as productive.
