[This is the third post about the creation of Ellen and the Winter Wolves. You can read part i here and part ii here.]
I mentioned last time that I’m using Kickstarter to fund my picture book Ellen and the Winter Wolves, so over the past week or so I’ve been preparing the campaign. That means shooting a video and thinking through what rewards to offer folks for helping out. Determining what something is worth is a challenge, let me tell you. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s ready and is set to launch on Friday, September 18th.
While preparing the Kickstarter I’ve also continued to work on the book, because, hey, it’s still not done. I finally finished painting the images around August 28th. I then began scanning the pictures in order to create the files I’ll need for printing. With scanning comes processing – inevitably dust will stick to the paintings and get transferred to the files, so I had to go through each picture and remove the dust in Photoshop. I also balanced the color and contrast in order to best match the look of the original piece.
Additional processing was necessary for a few of the images, though. I’m using three pictures in the book that I painted before I wrote it, and one of them needed some real work to match the story. This is one of them, Ellen and the Key.
I love this image and really wanted to keep it for the book, but there were a couple problems: First, the orientation of the painting is wrong for the format of the book. Whereas this is portrait, I needed it to be landscape. No problem. I simply cropped it. I lost the arch and some of the ironwork, sadly, but kept the essential parts.
The second problem was bigger. In the story I decided to make the teeth of Ellen’s key an oak leaf and the handle an acorn. The original was just a regular ol’ skeleton key. I wasn’t going to repaint the original, so I needed to make a new key. I’m pretty terrible at digital painting, so I painted a new key on a scrap of board, scanned it, and inserted it into the painting. I also changed the lantern a bit while I was at it.
I’m still processing the images, but when that’s done I’ll move on to creating the text files, then the cover. And when the Kickstarter concludes (successfully, one hopes) I’ll bundle everything together and send it off to the printer.
Stay tuned for the Kickstarter link!