Finishing a picture book isn’t so different from finishing a novel. Of course, “Ducks Love Hats” has no text, but each and every illustration must be checked and rechecked. If I’m lucky, I will catch any mistakes while editing this picture book.
How the Illustrations Were Done
The Creating Picture Book course started with five young people. Family problems took three of them away just as we were starting to draw the parts of the illustrations.
What I was left with were the four ducks in a variety of poses and eight hats. I had already volunteered to do the backgrounds. What I lacked, and two of those who had to leave were good at, were the people. People are a big challenge for me.
All of the ducks and hats were scanned into my computer. All of the background pages were scanned in.
Next, I did people outlines. There were two family groups of parents and two children. They did various things so I needed lots of different poses for each one. One saving part was being able to reuse some of the poses as the families came at different times in the story. Once the outlines were scanned in, I painted the people.
Using layers each person, duck and hat were put into the illustrations. I like using layers for this as I can resize and move them as needed.
Assembling the Picture Book
The layered illustrations are merged, saved and inserted into the book. The book itself is a Word document with 0.1” margins.
Then editing this picture book began. Hats were missing. Ducks were missing. People weren’t in the right places.
This is why I save the layered illustration as well as the merged one. I can open the layered one, make the needed changes, merge and insert the corrected illustration.
Final Touches
Title page and cover are the last things I do. However, editing this picture book will go on as several people look over the pages of the book itself without the title page and cover. I’m hoping they don’t find any more mistakes.
