Hindsight

Finished the first round of edits on the Odyssey layout. I think it’s pretty solid, though I’m still wrestling a bit with the last couple of pages. The original ending is abrupt, and I’m trying to make mine a little less so, but it’s not easy. The total page count right now is 242. Yikes!

I created a Facebook group, called “Odyssey Helpers and Officionados” (yes, I mis-spelled that — I mean no, it’s a new word I made up!). If you’re interested, please join. Benefits currently include a chance to be in the book, and to chat with me and my friends/fans.

I still can’t share much Odyssey art, but here’s one of the layout sketches from the end of the book.

Sorry, I haven’t been posting much because I have a nasty deadline looming. I have to deliver the Odyssey layouts to my editor next week so I can get feedback before she goes on (an inconveniently long) vacation.

I tried to record myself working on it, to show how my new layout process works. But I haven’t found the right software yet to capture video from the screen. It seems to be a tricky problem to record what I’m doing, because I draw very quickly with a very thin line, yet I don’t want the video to be enormous. The freeware I’ve tried yields too low a framerate, too big a file, and loses all detail if I downsample. Anyone have any experience with this? I suppose I may have to try zooming in on a small section and using a thicker line in order to get something that looks decent.

With every book I do, I feel compelled to tinker with the style and materials. This is just my own eclectic taste asserting itself. However, a more deliberate and practical form of tinkering I do with each book has to do with the process or workflow involved in going from a rough idea or text to a finished page. A good or bad process can have a huge impact on the speed and efficiency of doing the book, and moreover it can color the whole experience for better or worse, and can affect the creative process in subtle but profound ways.

For example, I did King Lear in a very unstructured way. The positive result was a very creative, non-rigid structure to the page layouts, and some surprising creative solutions to problems. The negative result was that I never really knew where I was in a scheduling sense, and ultimately the book took an incredibly long time and involved a lot of waste (redrawing pages that had major problems, redoing the lettering, that sort of thing).

One challenge I’ve always found a bit difficult is (consistently) leaving the correct amount of space for the text in each panel. So I’m trying a new, all-digital workflow (using my new tablet pc), where I draw my rough layouts directly in the layout program (in this case, InDesign) around the actual text. This lets me quickly scale and reshape things, eliminates the scanning step, and hopefully makes things faster and easier all around. We’ll see how it works out — so far, so good.

Here’s an example.

Did I mention I’m in a little printmaking class at CCAE? It’s all water-based, which appeals to me since I’d like to be able to do some stuff at home and in their open studio, and I don’t like working with solvents and such. Anyway, I missed a bunch of classes in a row (doh!), but here’s what I was fooling around with tonight. It’s on a tiny little block, about 2×4″, so I was having a little trouble keeping control of the cuts, but it came out better than most of the other ghastly things I’ve made in the class.