Hey Gang!

So with Inktober being over and the holiday season coming up - I wanted to collect all of my drawings into a single book to give out as gifts. I'm not sure where to look for the best deal vs quality - so I'm looking for some suggestions and guidance. Some things to consider:

1. My book will be long (64 pages). I wrote a little text for each illustration that utilized the official word prompt for each day. I imagine the book being laid out with text on the left, illustration on the right - hence the length.

2. The drawings I did where formatted for Instagram - so they were 6x6. Ideally I would like the book to be similar in size (6x6 or 7x7).

3. I'm interested in both hard cover and soft cover. Most of my books would be soft, but I'd like to get a few hard covers for myself / promotion.

I'm not 100% opposed to doing a different page size so the page count can be lower (32), where the illustration takes up the top portion of the page and the text sits below it. Unfortunately, text overlaid on the image won't work well in most cases. Below is a contact sheet of my drawings for context/reference:

Any and all advice and comments are appreciated.

Thanks!
Lawrence

Posting my entry...

Thanks!

Just an update to bump this thread. I've searched around the interwebs a lot and found some good options; some with compromises. I have a few prints arriving in the next week or so and will post my thoughts and some photos. Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions! Hope everyone had a great holiday.

Hey, @Fritz - from what others have said, it should come with time. It just may take a very long time depending on how much drawing you actually do; frequency and longevity. Drawing circles (and straight lines, etc) has always been difficult for me and I've decided to accept that I will never be able to draw a perfect circle, or at least as perfect of a circle (or ellipse) as I'd like it to look. Therefore, I use templates and a French curve when I can.

As a side note - one thing I still have a tough time discarding is the filter we sometimes have when looking at other artists' work, especially really good artists that we look up to. Take Jake Parker for instance. The man has a knack for creating really cool stuff. But, if you break it down and start looking at the individual pieces, the ink work is by no means "perfect". His straight lines aren't straight, his circles and curves are wobbly and so on. And I don't say this to be rude or discount his work and style - I love it. Things are in perspective, it's well designed and composed with variations in line weight and so on. We just glaze over the finer points and look at the whole because we didn't draw it ourselves. When you create something, you nit pick all the little details. You sweat over making that circle perfect or that line straight because you are constructing it.

Just my long-winded opinion/perspective, but hope that helps some.

Hey everyone! Long time, no post...

Just giving this thread a bump with an update. After doing a lot of research and comparing prices and getting test prints making adjustments and so on, I have some decent results to share. I will take some photos and do a write-up sometime this week. Sorry it took so long, but hopefully what I found out will help others with their projects.

Thanks!

@smceccarelli The texture is great! This makes me want to start using oil or chalk pastel! Really nice work.

My only real critique would be piggy-backing off of some other comments. The hand holding the test tube in the first one seems wrong. It should be holing from the top, not the bottom, as your wrist would turn "down" to pour, then back up to stop. In the current position, you'd have to really wrench your wrist awkwardly to stop pouring.

I agree with @Laurel-Aylesworth that the space shuttle in the middle one could be a bit bigger. And I also agree with @Kevin-Longueil that the hands of the last girl should either be holding the plugs themselves, or gripping the cord right behind the plug (hands butted right up against them).

I want prints of these for my daughter's room!

@fritz No "like", but there is an "upvote" button.
The little up and down arrows on the bottom right next to "reply" and "quote".

@smceccarelli - Thank you! I will check out Bubu and see what kind of options/prices they have given the format I'm looking for. I definitely don't want to do saddle stitching (staples). I've done that before, having worked in comics as a colorist for a while. I really want to do a bound book - whether that's perfect bound, lay-flat, or whatever.
What was the turn around and shipping time, if you recall?
Thanks again for the kind words and info.

@Kevin-Longueil - Thanks, Kevin! It was a lot of hard work and really late nights (I work full-time). I'm very happy that I saw it through.

@moldrewes - Thank you! I did find Blurb as one option. I think where I'm going to get slammed on pricing is the page count, if I decide to stick with 64 pages. It might be worth it though, to hold something that substantial? haha - Or maybe I do a few that way and the rest as 32 pages... Decisions, decisions.

@Eli - haha, thank you so much! From the on-set, I planned on getting at least one made for myself. I've had quite a few people on Instagram ask if I planned on making a book and if they could get one (which is where I got the idea of giving them out as gifts). If this goes well and they look good in print, I may throw it up on Amazon so others can get a copy.

Thanks again, everyone! I'll keep updating this thread with what I find, pricing, experience, etc so it can serve as a resource for others.

Hi @Kali-Williams ! I think what you have here is a good start. It definitely shows the panic of the geese. I think if you have your grandmother at more of an angle to our left (or flip her to face the right) you'll be able to show more of her arms holding the gun outward and the stream of water coming from it.

ref:

Some other thoughts:

• If you were to elevate or lower your camera's view, you could pull back and show a car close to the camera (as if the camera was looking over top of it or off to the side). This would help show the geese were blocking the way as they're flying up from the walkway.
  ref:
  

• You could do a reverse angle, as if looking out the door, and grandma would be close to the camera as we look down the gun, the water, geese flying away from us revealing the car in the distance.
  ref:
  

On the topic of composition - one of the coolest exercises I learned in art shcool was the teapot and teacup. Take a sheet of paper and layout a grid of duplicate squares. Then use each square to come up with a different composition of the teapot and teacup together in the same scene. Do as many as you can possibly think of, then do some more. We used to do about 50 to 100.
ref 1 (you can do smaller 1 inch squares; these are meant to be thumbnails):

ref 2 (example of the exercise):

Hope that helps!

@teju-abiola Echoing pretty much what everyone else has said so far: Your work is fantastic, Teju; I love it! Can't wait to see more.

Hey everyone! Long time, no post...

Just giving this thread a bump with an update. After doing a lot of research and comparing prices and getting test prints making adjustments and so on, I have some decent results to share. I will take some photos and do a write-up sometime this week. Sorry it took so long, but hopefully what I found out will help others with their projects.

Thanks!

@teju-abiola Echoing pretty much what everyone else has said so far: Your work is fantastic, Teju; I love it! Can't wait to see more.

@smceccarelli Awesome, Simona - I love it!

@fritz No "like", but there is an "upvote" button.
The little up and down arrows on the bottom right next to "reply" and "quote".

@smceccarelli The hairdryer, HA!

@smceccarelli I think this will turn out great! I immediately thought of two pieces:

Where The Wild Things Are:

Calvin & Hobbes:

I kind of like seeing the different perspective of the turned-around bear. If you wanted, you could slightly turn the head so he/she is looking back at the one hanging on the tree, perhaps in astonishment. Or maybe take one of the other bears and turn them more, so they're not all facing the same direction - like the one that can't see with the hat on its head.

Overall, I'm diggin' it! Nice work.

@demotlj All you might have to do is raise the horizon and relocate a bird or two to get the desired effect.
And as long as you keep your foreground darker than your background, you should get a real sense of distance and height.

@smceccarelli The texture is great! This makes me want to start using oil or chalk pastel! Really nice work.

My only real critique would be piggy-backing off of some other comments. The hand holding the test tube in the first one seems wrong. It should be holing from the top, not the bottom, as your wrist would turn "down" to pour, then back up to stop. In the current position, you'd have to really wrench your wrist awkwardly to stop pouring.

I agree with @Laurel-Aylesworth that the space shuttle in the middle one could be a bit bigger. And I also agree with @Kevin-Longueil that the hands of the last girl should either be holding the plugs themselves, or gripping the cord right behind the plug (hands butted right up against them).

I want prints of these for my daughter's room!

@smceccarelli These are fantastic!

Hey, @Fritz - from what others have said, it should come with time. It just may take a very long time depending on how much drawing you actually do; frequency and longevity. Drawing circles (and straight lines, etc) has always been difficult for me and I've decided to accept that I will never be able to draw a perfect circle, or at least as perfect of a circle (or ellipse) as I'd like it to look. Therefore, I use templates and a French curve when I can.

As a side note - one thing I still have a tough time discarding is the filter we sometimes have when looking at other artists' work, especially really good artists that we look up to. Take Jake Parker for instance. The man has a knack for creating really cool stuff. But, if you break it down and start looking at the individual pieces, the ink work is by no means "perfect". His straight lines aren't straight, his circles and curves are wobbly and so on. And I don't say this to be rude or discount his work and style - I love it. Things are in perspective, it's well designed and composed with variations in line weight and so on. We just glaze over the finer points and look at the whole because we didn't draw it ourselves. When you create something, you nit pick all the little details. You sweat over making that circle perfect or that line straight because you are constructing it.

Just my long-winded opinion/perspective, but hope that helps some.