Category: GKP Writing News

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GKP Writing News

Creating Picture Book Pages

When I painted the panels for “Waiting For Fairies”, I painted the entire picture each time. However, I didn’t do that for “For Love of Goats”. Creating picture book pages depends on the illustrations for me.

watercolor image of little spider begins creating picture book pages
My first step for creating the pages for “The Little Spider” was to sketch, then watercolor the main images. The story is about a little spider that goes ballooning to a new home. this image is when the little spider is airborne.

Combining Watercolor and Computer

My picture book pages always begin with watercolor. First I do a rough sketch. Then I add the paint.

As I do the sketches, I am already looking over my ideas for the final illustrations. Although it’s great to do the entire picture in watercolor, sometimes using the computer to do some of it is better. This will be true for “The Little Spider”.

This is especially true for the text. I love doing the lettering, but rarely have all of the text look alike. The computer does all the text with the same lettering making it much easier to read which is important in a picture book.

adding background while creating picture book pages
For this picture book I am combining computer and watercolor images. For this page I started a new page and put a full light blue color. The watercolor image is selected using freehand selection keeping as close to the image as possible. It is copied onto the blue background. Then comes the tedious task of removing any white surrounding the image. I prefer using the eraser rather than painting to do this. It takes several passes using progressively smaller erasers.

“The Little Spider” Illustrations

My watercolor panels are very spare. They tell a simple story. Because the little spider lives in an area with lots of background that obscures that story, I don’t want to add much of it.

To achieve this, I have painted background panels. One is of the ground. It is mostly in shades of brown.

However, this is boring. So another panel has various objects such a small ferns, leaves, rocks, sticks etc. When I add ground to a panel, a few of these objects will get added too.

adding text for creating picture book pages
In my opinion the text in a picture book needs to be simple and easy to read. Personally I like using Georgia font as I like serifs and the rounder shapes than found in Times New Roman. The image has been narrowed for web viewing, so the text may be adjusted later. However, this is close to my final page for this panel. It took close to an hour to complete from creating the background color to adding the text. And this is one of the simpler pages out of the thirty-two for the book.

Background Colors

The sky will appear in several of the illustrations. Yes, I could do a wash of blue. My washes tend to have brush strokes and I would prefer not to have these in the illustrations.

Instead I will use a computer generated blue panel. This makes the sky a flat blue which it is and keeps it definitely in the background with the story scene on top of it.

The same is true of other scenes where I want a green background, but not one to overshadow the watercolor panels. I can add a few grass plants onto the flat background.

Creating picture book pages takes lots of planning and time. For me it also takes combining watercolor and computer to get just the illustrations I want.

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“The Last Train From Hiroshima” Book Review

The world and war changed on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. Tokyo time. If all you know about that day and August 9, 1945, is that atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened the cities, killed thousands of people and ended World War II, you are the victim of the spin doctors. “The Last Train From Hiroshima” by Charles Pellegrino tells the stories of the survivors and victims of both sides relating what really happened.

History, real history, is more than names, dates and heroic deeds. It is littered with people and events that make you feel uncomfortable. Yet, if that history is white washed, it will happen again. The purpose of looking at history is to learn from the mistakes and decisions of the past. And, as many have known for years, people can learn more from their mistakes than their successes.

Story of Hiroshima

Why do we learn so little about what actually happened on those days? General MacArthur laid out his Protocol forbidding survivors from talking about what happened. He curtailed any scientific research about it. He confiscated and classified written information about it. Then he and the Japanese government put out their sanitized versions.

John Hershey managed to gather and publish some of what did happen. His book, “Hiroshima” follows six survivors on that day and for some days afterwards. Dr. Paul Takashi Nagai published “The Bells of Nagasaki”, the story of his survival and the efforts of the University medical school personel and became the focus of a smear campaign.

Atomic Bomb Trivia

Did you know the Hiroshima bomb was a dud? Only around 10% of it exploded.

How does an atomic bomb explode? It isn’t one explosion, but a series of waves each carrying its own type of destruction.

How many people died? No one knows or will ever know.

Why did some people survive even though they were close to the explosion? Some of the Hiroshima survivors took that Last Train from Hiroshima just in time for the second bomb and survived that one too.

And the second bomb didn’t explode over Nagasaki, but its suburb Urikami, just over a little hill. This made it easy to hide the true effects of the second bomb which was a plutonium bomb, not an atom bomb and three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. Yet, this bomb has been relegated to little more than a sentence or two in the history books.

Aftermath

Few people knew about the effects of radiation. People without a scratch on them would sicken and die days, weeks or years later as speculation about what was wrong proliferated. These effects too were mostly hidden from the public.

Some older survivors of one or both bombs lived long lives advocating for peace. They had lived through hell and didn’t want anyone else to have to. Masahiro Sasaki summed it up this way: “It’s been more than sixty years since the bombs were dropped. God made everyone equal. So, I forgot who dropped the bomb. What I am trying to say is that it does not matter who dropped the bomb. It’s not an issue. It should never be an issue for any country. It’s an issue for all humanity.

“The important thing is that I, and Sadako (his sister who folded paper cranes as she was dying cancer caused by radiation), knew the feeling of Omiyari (In your heart, always think about the other person before yourself.) – and if this principle can be taken to heart and passed down by just a few of you here in this room today, it may, in time, lessen the dangers in the world.”

This is an excellently written book. It is objective, not dwelling on gory details. That does not make this an easy book to read.

My ratings and book reviews of both “Last Train from Hiroshima” and “The Bells of Nagasaki” are on Goodreads.

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Coloring Little Spider

Coloring Little Spider is the easy part. Sort of. Getting all the sketches done was the difficult part.

Planning “The Little Spider”

I did have a rough text list for this picture book. However, as I did the sketches, some of the text didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of it for all the pages of the book.

I went back to the computer and started creating pages. The first one was the title page. then a copyright page. Neither one had a sketch.

Then each drawing was matched to a page and the text was written on the page. Another wrinkle to doing this was keeping the pages on the correct side. There is a right facing page (odd numbers) and a left facing page (even numbers).

Some of the pages didn’t have sketches. These were added to the stack.

Coloring Little Spider

Baby spiders called spiderlings are not the same color as adult spiders usually. Different kinds of spiders have different shapes.

My little spider is a composite, but mostly garden spider. I laid out my paints.

Greens were needed for the plants. Little spider needed ocher yellow, gray and black. Webs and spider silk are white, but this wouldn’t show up, so I’m using thin black lines.

coloring little spider and her journey
The little spider says “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” Why? Follow along to find out as the little spider leaves her web behind and searches for a high place. Her first attempt is a long blade of grass as shown in this image.

Patience?

I like watercolor. It has a really nice look to it and is versatile. Texture comes from layering the paint. Tones come from adding water.

That is the drawback to watercolor. It is a water-based paint. Each color must dry thoroughly before the next one is added.

This takes patience. Rushing lets the colors bleed into one another. I’m not good at patience.

My solution is to work on several sketches at a time. One round I spend coloring little spider. Another round I paint the grass. Still another round is for adding legs to little spider.

This first time through the sketches won’t finish them. I will go back over them to add more texture to the grasses and stems and branches.

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Social Media

“Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be available to readers by next week. That leaves me looking at more ways to let people know about my new book. The suggestion so many have is to be on social media.

Irritatingly, people and businesses assume everyone is on these various platforms. The only two I am on are Pinterest and Goodreads. There are no plans to be on any of the others.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
As I launch this new novel, my dream is for people to notice and read it. But people won’t notice it unless I can let them know it exists.

Why Not be on Social Media?

Time is a big reason I am not on these platforms. Since I am not online at home, my internet time is very limited, usually about five hours a week. This does not go very far.

Perhaps I could be online at home, but the service stinks. There is good service up on top of the hill because a teacher lives there and it was put in for virtual teaching. Those lines do not come down to me and won’t any time soon.

That leaves me with slow, unrealiable service be it through the phone company or satellite. It’s much cheaper and better to use the internet at the library, so that is what I do.

Nor can I use a cell phone to access the internet. Well, I suppose I could, if I wanted to go hiking across the creek, down two pastures and up on a hill to find service.

Privacy

Another big reason for me to not be on social media is privacy. The companies behind these platforms only want to sell me things I have no use for or sell my information to others who want to sell me things I do not want. It’s bad enough using Yahoo.

Yes, I do know privacy is a thing of the past. However, I enjoy the illusion.

Even more chilling for me is the amount of misinformation found on these platforms. I am not interested in sifting through the lies, the political rhetoric, the deceptions, the frauds and more.

When you do seek information, how do you know it’s for real? I’m reminded of a cartoon from some magazine of a dog at a computer saying “Online, no one knows you’re a dog.”

Where does this leave me?

It leaves me a website few people visit. It leaves me a network of people I know through Goodreads and NaNo (National Novel Writing Month).

My first promotion of Hopes, Dreams and Reality” will be free downloads through Smashwords for two weeks. If you are reading this and wish to take advantage of this offer, I would really appreciate it if you would leave a positive review of the book on its Smashwords or Amazon book page.

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Designing Picture Books

Designing picture books is challenging. I’m wrestling with this now as I do sketches for “The Little Spider”.

If you think all you need are a bunch of related illustrations and some simple text, you are not writing and have never written such a book.

The Framework

There are two themes to a picture book. One is the text story. The other is the picture story. They are separate, yet they merge the two into a whole.

Although these books are no longer limited to 32 pages, they do usually have a page total divisible by four. This has to do with how the books are printed.

The Text

The amount of text depends on the age range of the intended reader or listener. Very young children have books with very little text with a limited vocabulary. Very good examples were written by Dr. Seuss.

As the age of the reader increases, the amount of text increases. The books become more like illustrated stories.

“The Little Spider” is for the younger set so the text is limited and repetitive. The illustrations help by showing what the text is talking about.

photographs for designing picture books
One of the little spider’s adventures is meeting up with a bee in a flower. I took the camera out as the little spider was climbing a chicory stem and met a green native bee in a flower. The bees are camera shy, but I persevered. This picture became a model for some picture book sketches.

The Illustrations

Often the person doing the illustrations is not the person doing the text. Instead, that person is known for their art be it watercolor, pen and ink, decoupage, pencil or many other possibilities.

I and many other authors do both the text and illustrations. This gives the author more control over how the two work together in the book.

“The Little Spider”

This book is a simple story of a small spider that balloons to a new location. To do this, the little spider must find a high place and spin a line of silk for the wind to carry it off.

In designing picture books like this one, I first write out a series of text lines. The repetitive line is “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” This is found on the left page as the little spider ends each attempt and goes on to the next. The next action begins on the right page.

So far, my little spider has had seven attempts covering 14 pages. That leaves me devising seven more adventures.

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The Little Spider

In late spring long lines of spider silk waft across the yard. These are single strands, not webs. “The Little Spider” was written as I found out more about these gossamer strands.

Lots of spiders call my place home. They come in many sizes and colors. They are welcome as they help decimate the fly and mosquito populations. The orb web weavers are the main ones to make gossamer silk in the spring.

Spring Spiders

Wolf and jumping spiders survive the winter hidden in building crevices or leaf litter in the woods. They come out on warm winter days and in the spring. By summer these have laid eggs that hatch over the summer into fall. These rarely make gossamer silk.

The Little Spider was once an egg in a case
In late summer the large garden spiders – all females – mate and create egg cases like these. The spiders will die with frost. The egg cases will survive the winter protecting the eggs inside. These will become baby spiders once spring warms the area.

Orb weaving spiders die in the fall. They leave behind silken egg containers filled with eggs that hatch in the spring (Remember “Charlotte’s Web”?). These spiderlings scatter and build tiny webs in the grass. I see them decorated with dew shining in the morning sun.

These spiderlings are nearly blind as were their parents. However they do want to move away into their own territories so they can get more food.

Spiders On the Move

Tiny spiderlings may run fast, but it takes a long time for them to go any distance simply because they are so small. “The Little Spider” is about such a little spiderling that wants to move and has a way to go a great distance.

When the temperature is warm and the air has a slight updraft, spiderlings find a high place to stand. They spin a strand of gossamer silk. The air catches the silk and pulls it upward.

When the silk is long enough, the pull is great enough for the spiderling to be pulled aloft. This is called ballooning.

How Far?

Although most spiderlings don’t drift very far, others do. They have been found thousands of feet in the air on airplanes or miles out to sea on ships. Some cross the English Channel.

gossamer spider silk on pasture
Gossamer silk spreads across the pasture after spiders go ballooning and return to earth. A few build webs soon after landing.

After landing, the spiderlings cut loose their silk strand. These gossamer strands are left spread across pastures, buildings or blowing in the wind.

This journey is the story in my proposed picture book “The Little Spider”. Being a picture book, illustrations are important and take a long time to do. They begin with the sketches I am doing now just as a tiny spider’s journey begins with finding that high spot.

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Changing Novels Into Books

When I wrote my first novel, “Broken Promises”, I had the idea that completing the novel was all there was to it. How wrong I was. Changing novels into books takes lots more work and thought. Open any novel and you can see all the extra things added.

Front Matter

All the pages before the first line of the novel are referred to as front matter. This can include the title page, copyright page, dedication and table of contents. These are not always the same for a printed book and a digital one.

My title pages always have a reference to the place the book is published. I have my print copy, GoatKeepers Press; the Kindle copy, Kindle Edition; and the Smashwords copy, Smashwords Edition.

The Table of Contents lists the same chapters. It doesn’t have to be in the printed book, but must be in the digital ones.

Each chapter has a title. The print book has page numbers. The digital copies have hyperlinks from the Table to the chapters and back again.

The Novel

Well, this is what I wrote, isn’t it? Changing novels into books means making changes here too.

Look at a published novel. All the text has even edges on left and right. There are page numbers. Each chapter usually begins on a new page.

And the last page of each chapter is not only a line or two long. If this is the case, I go back in the chapter and either add text or condense so the last page has several lines or becomes part of the previous page.

Digital copies have no page numbers. Usually, they have few page designations as the text flows freely on the ereader. The text is not justified with those even edges, but left justified.

part of changing novels into books is writing the back cover
Potential readers often look first at the title, then the cover and last the back cover for a summary of the book. Each indicates something about the book letting the reader know if it is a book that sounds interesting to them. The novel is important, both the story and the editing. but the title and cover are just as important as the novel will never be read if the others don’t interest the reader enough to open the cover. This one needs work.

Back Matter

Lots of stuff can be at the end of a novel. Some series have the first chapter of the next book. Acknowledgements by the author to people who helped with the novel, comments about the novel and lists of other books by the author are common.

Print books list the author’s website or other social media platform. Digital copies may even include links to these places.

Changing novels into books takes time and thought. But a book is not complete without all of these additions.

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Hopes, Dreams and Reality Cover

I am not an artist or an illustrator really. I am an author who needs covers and illustrations for books and prefers or needs to do them myself. That is the case for the “Hopes, Dreams and Reality” cover.

The novel surrounds a storm, before, during and after. Mindy, the main character, goes through the storm even though it leaves her isolated with no phone, electricity or water and with the road washed out and blocked by fallen trees. Other complications arise both just before and during the storm.

Planning the Cover

Since the storm is the main trigger for all that happens, it made sense to me to use it on the cover. It is a major storm and Mindy must fight it, so the cover has her fighting the storm.

A sketch took shape around these. This was done on drawing paper with pencil. It was transferred to watercolor paper for painting.

My preferred medium is watercolor. The quality of the colors appeal to me although I am prone to make mistakes. Watercolor mistakes are permanent and must be incorporated into the painting or mitigated somehow.

A big storm keeps the day dark, muting colors. The mood will also be muted. These affect the colors I choose to use for the Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover.

Working In Watercolor

Once the sketch is on the watercolor paper and the chosen tube of paints are laid out, the actual painting can begin. Watercolor has several choices and problems to work with.

There is no white in watercolor. The paper is white and, wherever white is wanted, no paint is put. This takes careful planning. It is possible to mask these areas, but I don’t.

Watercolor paint is just that: water based. The painter must add water to the paint in order to use it. More water results in a thin layer of color called a wash. Less water gives sharper lines and thicker color. When to use wash or dry brush needs planning ahead too.

The final, and most difficult for me, problem is time. Each color must have time to dry before a neighboring spot is painted or the paint will bleed or spread into the other area altering color and shape. I hate to sit and wait.

Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover
My covers are a usually a blend of digital and watercolor. For the Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover, I painted the figure then scanned it into the computer. Then I added the background color and printing. Sometimes I do these with watercolor, but opted for the digital with this cover. And, yes, I corrected a few problems with the watercolor.

The Cover

After negotiating my way through all of the steps, I finally have the Hopes, Dreams and Reality cover. Now I need to finish the final edit.

If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know through the Contact Page.

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Creating Book Covers

My last week has been spent creating book covers for both my new novel “Hopes, Dreams and Reality” and the teaching units from “The City Water Project”. That means nine covers.

Finding Images

There are online places to seek and purchase novel covers. I’ve looked at a couple and found the covers look nice, but don’t suit what I’ve written.

That leaves me deciding on images and drawing my cover designs. For nature books I can use photographs with the title etc. put on them using the computer. All other book covers must be drawn.

The image must reflect the book or teaching unit. The first water unit has two activities concerned with bottled waters and comparing tastes. The cover image is a water bottle.

For “Hopes, Dreams and Reality” the choice was more difficult. The book spans almost a month. The major storm takes four days yet sets everything else in motion. So, the image needed to reflect the storm.

Readers like seeing people on the covers. I don’t like drawing people. Having the main character, Mindy, standing holding an umbrella seemed so trite. The cover image I’m working with has Mindy fighting the wind and rain with her umbrella on her way to the barn.

Complications in Creating Book Covers

There is more on a book cover than the image. The title and author is on it too. The image may take center stage, but there must be room for the writing.

Another decision is whether or not I will write the title on the image or use the computer to add it to the image as I finish the cover later. With the teaching units I printed the titles on the covers. For my novel, I will use the computer.

creating book covers requires fitting the cover to the project
If this were a book cover, I would add a dark blue border to define the cover as I did with “The Pumpkin Project”. This is for a digital download teaching unit from “The cith Water Project” so the border is not needed.

Creating the Cover

Sketches are fine. I sketch all my covers and illustrations with pencil first. Then I clear table space and take out my watercolors.

Watercolor pictures look good to me. I like the quality of the colors.

Watercolor is unforgiving. Any mistake is permanent. That is a major reason most artists prefer painting with oils and acrylics.

Digital Art

I know a digital artist and love her work. I still prefer creating book covers and illustrations with watercolor. Then I scan them into my computer.

This lets me add writing, if I want to, crop the image to the size of the book and, most importantly, fix mistakes where lines got too thick and other flaws in my image. I can also add an all over background color instead of using a wash.

Does my method of creating book covers work for everyone? Definitely not. It does work for me.

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Wrapping Up Loose Ends

As both a writer and a person growing old, I find more and more of my life is spent wrapping up loose ends. There are so many projects close to done waiting for those final bits of effort.

Why Not Finish Things?

Mostly projects get left behind when circumstances change. Another factor can be a change in life’s focus. And projects can lose their appeal, get boring.

Some projects do get done and then need repairs. Puppies do a lot of damage to quilts. Time to do those needed repairs never seems to get worked into the schedule so the project lingers, undone.

One I’m trying to make presentable as I will never fully finish it, is a tea cloth. What, you ask, is a tea cloth? Truthfully, I didn’t know when I started this project.

literally wrapping up loose ends in tatting
Shuttle tatting is slow. Real tatting thread is about the size of quilting thread. I prefer using size 30 thread as the result is still lacy, but I make progress faster. Many patterns do call for the larger thread. I did this tea cloth in separate parts as much as possible. To explain: the outside sets of three medalions have two smaller outside ones and a big one joining them. I tatted all of the smaller ones then did the bigger center one joining them into eight units. These were joined to the cloth when the chain around the inserts was done. The triangular tatted sections were completed and joined with the chain as well. The inserts were the last things to sew in.

Challenges

A friend taught me to tat when I was attending UCLA. I had these classes right after lunch and kept falling asleep. Tatting kept me awake, but left me able to take notes too.

Tatting is a way of making lace. I learned to use a shuttle, not the more modern needle tatting some people do now.

I enjoyed tatting, acquired books of patterns, made lots of stuff. Most tatting patterns are for bookmarks and doilies. I got bored and wanted a challenge.

There was my challenge, the picture in the center of a new book. Tea cloth. One hundred fifty different designs for the various parts. Perfect.

Wrapping Up Loose Ends

A tea cloth is a small tablecloth. My mostly finished one is six feet across. All the designs are done. The cloth inserts are tacked in.

There are some two thousand knots left to secure with a needle and clip ends. A good ironing is needed to take out the wrinkles. And neither will happen.

Instead, I am tacking my tea cloth between two clear plastic sheets. I want something different as a cloth under my book display and this will be it. After all, with forty years of off-and-on effort to get this far and a lack of anyplace else to show this off, it will now come out of the closet.

What Else?

Since this project is done, I need to tackle another one. There are two quilt tops in the cedar chest. The spool knitted throw needs puppy repairs.

And, maybe I’ll get around to wrapping up loose ends of writing projects sitting on my computer.