Another month gone by so quickly! October was devoted to making revisions to my "Pie" dummy and getting several copies bound up and shipped off to my agent so that he can start submitting.
I spoke with Steven at the beginning of the month, and he gave me a list of suggested revisions for Scrumptious Yum-o-licious Pie. First of all, the title has (tentatively) changed, to The Birthday Pie Surprise. Steven felt my original title might be too difficult for children to say, and it just didn't feel "right" to him somehow. This news made my husband, Geoff, very happy, since he disliked "Scrumptious Yum-o-licious" from the beginning. He thought it had too much of a "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" ring to it. I felt (and still feel) that "Scrumptious Yum-o-licious" is appropriate to the story, since each ingredient that Grandpa buys for the pie is supposed to be scrumptious, yummy, or delicious. But I couldn't ignore the protests from Geoff and Steven, so I compromised. The new title is on the front cover of the dummy, and the old title is listed as an "alternate" on the back cover. My thought is: sell the book first, worry about the title later.
To go with the revised title, Steven felt some sort of cover image was called for. I agreed that it would add a lot to the dummy and came up with this:
In terms of the interior art, Steven rightly observed that my kitty drawings looked too much like doggie drawings. He wasn't the first to make this point, so back to the drawing board I went. Here are the results of my extreme kitty makeover:
Finally, Steven felt the dummy could use one more full-color spread. He suggested I paint the scene at the butcher shop, and I am very pleased with the result.
Of course, after I did the new color art work, the old art did not look consistent with it. So I had to go back and redo or rework each of my other color pieces. I added some color to the characters' faces to warm them up a bit, and put some more texture and hints of dimension in the paintings. Because it is a pain in the arse to update my website, I have not added the new or reworked images yet. However, you can find them on my page at portfolios.com.
After the new color art was done, I was almost to the finish line. I made a few more revisions to the black-and-white sketches, especially those of the Grandpa character, to make them more consistent. As any picture book illustrator knows, character consistency is extremely important. A kid has to be convinced that the Grandpa on page 15 is the same Grandpa he saw on page 6. It's quite challenging (for me, anyway).
Then it was time to print, bind and ship off. This involved a ton of prep in Photoshop. The earlier dummies I had made were all laid out on 11 x 17 paper, which was then folded in half to make the book; this time I wanted to print on 8.5 x 11 so that I could do everything at home and control the quality of the copies. Essentially, I had to redo the entire layout of the book, including retyping the text. Many, many hours and about $80 of printer ink later, the dummies were printed. Off to Kinko's to trim the pages and have them bound, then into the mail they went! Steven says he is going to start submitting as soon as they arrive. I'm looking forward to hearing who gets the first round of submissions.
So, that's it. October was the month of the "Pie" dummies. I didn't get to anything else this month (no New Moon art, no editorial illustration), because getting the dummies out was top priority. Hope to make November a catch-up month in that regard, and I must also start a rough draft of an "intro" Horace and Amelia story. Steven thinks the story I gave to him will make a great secondary book, but we need to "meet" the characters first in a separate book. Sounds like fun!
Comments