"Ducks Love Hats" Archives - GoatKeepers Press

Don’t let anyone tell you picture books are easy to write. All they are doing is showing how little they know about writing. And I really know this is true finishing “Ducks Love Hats”.

At First

There was no plan to really write a book in the lesson plans for Creating Picture Books. Even the original idea sounded flimsy, not nearly enough to fill 32 pages.

How could so few people even dream of creating a book? This was especially true as we only met four times formally. Still, we latched onto the dream.

Finally !

Every page of this little book took hours of work to complete. As these pages were assembled out of pieces done by class members, some of these pages took over 20 layers for the backgrounds, the ducks, the people and the hats.

I am slow with this. Each item had to be created, resized, added to the main page. Did it need to be above or below the other items? Those messy edges had to be erased.

Meet the cover of the new picture book “Ducks Love Hats”. It is illustrations only so you can make the tale as complex as you want. The book will be available by the end of September, 2025.

Covers and Title Page

I read around 200 picture books a year. They have a wide variety of illustration styles, many approaches to covers and title pages.

All the book collaborators decided on a color scheme, a title, illustrations. I began with the title page, except it worked better as the cover. What to do for the title page?

Perhaps I could repeat the cover which is sometimes done. However, a different design is better. The new design didn’t match the color scheme, so it changed.

Finishing “Ducks Love Hats”

When working on a book project, it’s easy for a writer to get so involved mistakes sneak in unnoticed. You see or read what you think should be there, even when it isn’t.

The final step is for other people to look the pages over. Then the book will truly be done.

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.

A happy duck family swims away with their hats in “Ducks Love Hats” by Karen GoatKeeper and others.

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.