Proof I'm Awesome

This morning, the SU Publications Office let me see a proof of my final book so I could approve it for final printing. It's even better than I anticipated! And, I have pictures:

The front cover!

Look how thin this is compared to my dummy or the binders with the original artwork.

The first spread! It's not perfect bound yet, so each of the pages was loose in the binding. You can't really see it in this shot, but the print quality is amazing. I'm so excited to have sixty(!) of these in less than a week.

I'm No Dummy

Big news! I handed in my final document to SU Publications (thank you Clare Merrick!) They required files from me today, but also a dummy so they know what the final book should look like. So I printed out every page individually, cut them out and taped the corresponding pages into spreads (ick), and then proceeded to place them in an order that I liked. This was a fun process in a way, because I got to spread them all out on the studio floor and see them all together:

And then Allie took some pictures of me doing my best impression of Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch:

And then I decided on the final layout:

After I decided on the layout, I spent forever taping the spreads together in the right order. The result is a hoopty but serviceable dummy for the printer so they have a reference:

I decided I wanted the cover to look like the cover of the sketchbook I've been working in to emphasize the impromptu and personal nature of a lot of these stories. So the cover and back cover is literally just my actual sketchbook, which I wrote on in white-out and then scanned in using my roommate's scanner.

A couple of my favorite spreads in dummy form:

You can see how the pages don't quite line up, thanks to my shoddy hand skills. But I handed it into the Publications office so I will be receiving the final copy in about two weeks, with a color proof sometime next week. I am so very very excited!

Going Digital

Yesterday, I scanned every page and then imported the scanned files into InDesign. Here is a screencap of what just a portion of my project looks like, at about 12% zoom.

This makes me feel pretty awesome.

Tonight, I will be messing around with the layout of the informational pages. I scanned in a bunch of my sketches from my original notebooks as well as the writing I needed for them, and I'm going to play around with that in Photoshop before importing them into InDesign. (I'll post those too, or snippets of those, as I finish them.) This will be the only digital manipulation this project has in it. I'm pretty proud of that.

Bill came into the studio while I was scanning this all, sat down, and said, "I can't believe you did this." I kind of can't believe it either.

No More Painting!

I'm finished painting!!

My overstuffed portfolios of work for this project. The bottom one is entirely filled (that's 48 pages) and the top one is a quarter filled (12 pages).

Splaying the pages open to see all the pages in the first portfolio (which is balanced on my lap on a couch at studio.)

There's Allie in the background working diligently on a project for our major. I thought I'd be cute and photograph the painting she's in with me.

Now the trick will be finishing everything up in time for getting this to the printer on Tuesday. Wish me luck!

Happy April!

Hello all!

April brings with it the completion (gasp!) of this project. It's a surreal feeling to be at the end of this, especially when I look back at old entries when I was just beginning the sketching phase. I'm actually very proud of this project-- its content, quality, and the fact that I followed through on something that has been an aspiration of mine for a while (to write and illustrate my own graphic novel). It definitely helps to have the supervision and support of professors and the wonderful people in the Honors Department to keep me going week to week. And soon I'll be posting an entire list of people I need to thank, because there are way too many to fit on half a page in my actual published document.

So since the deadline for getting this to the printer approacheth, this is my last week of painting content. (Wow.) So here's a glimpse of what's on the drawing board (painting board?) this week:

So tune in later this week for the last batch (wow, I still can't get over that!) of painting, and any more updates about actual publication. 'Til next time!