Friday 2 December 2011

wormwood rides again

'wormwood, earth and honey' is being e-booked. The poems have been subjected to mostly very minor tweaks (to remove punctuational peculiarities and a small number of wince-making phrases) so it's still fundamentally the same book. Now the hard work begins. This is to be an illustrated version. My view is that people's eyes light up when you tell them something has got pictures in it. I've tested the water on facebook and twitter and received very encouraging responses. Even people who already have the paperback have said they'll buy an e-version with pics.

All I have to do is draw the pictures.

This is going to be a sort of mini-blog in which I chart my progress.

Step one: I have decided on materials. I'm working grey scale with high contrast, so will be almost certainly using charcoal and black fine-liner on gessoed paper. I've done this before, and it works.

Step two: the paper I have in stock is too big so I will need to cut it right down, partly for ease of scanning, and partly because a small picture is generally quicker to do than a large picture. Also, as far as illustrating is concerned, if the illustration is done in the first place not much bigger than it will appear in the e-book then it's far easier for the illustrator to get it to look 'right'.

Step three: decide which poems to illustrate. They will need to be spread throughout the anthology rather than be all in one section, obviously, as I don't want to muck around with the order of the poems.
Step four: make some porridge. It's cold today. I need fuel before I do anything else.

2 comments:

Rosalie Warren said...

What a wonderful idea. Please put me on your list of people who already have the paperback version of Wormwood but will be queuing up to download the illustrated version. Wishing you every success.

Catherine Edmunds said...

Thank you Rosalie!