Beginnings of a Book....


Busy hands....  I gots 'em.

Drawing, designing, still experimenting with clay (more on that later).  Among it all, one of the projects that I have in mind is to write a tweens/teens book since I have a really good concept for one.  I began working on the characters.  This is my first one:  






I plan to name her Kai.  There are 3 characters in the book, Kai, Alisa and the last one I'm still trying to name.  After creating her, I began also trying to draw this same character in different poses/expressions.  Ish is mad hard to do!!  I will need to practice that, though, because your character really does have to look uniform throughout the illustrations in the book.

My attempts at uniformity:




Wellllll..... I need to keep working on it!  Practice, they say....

Now....here is a funny thing.  Sometimes I draw thinking I'm making one thing and it turns out I made something else without realizing it.  Kai is kind of a clone of me, somewhat.  I didn't realize it until I finished here.  She is definitely a take on THIS me:



For real, though,, right? lmao!  I guess since my face is the one that I see more than any other I drew myself (almost) without even knowing.  Gotta make sure not to do that with EVERY woman I draw!!

As I began working on this project I also started drawing a few backgrounds for the different scenes that the characters should be in, like the front stoop of one of the girls houses, etc.  I also began to research more into what it will take to get an illustrated book such as this published.  It won't have pictures on every page, but I do want to have some illustration in it.  What I learned through researching, though, is that when publishing houses accept and decide to print your book, they use their own in house illustrators!  Well, damn!  That screws up my whole plan!!  Part of the joy for me in writing the book is not just writing the story but also presenting my illustrations.  So  That.... Just..... SUCKS!!!  I also looked into self publishing and found that books that are illustrated are far more expensive to produce, especially those where the artwork is in color.  Hmpf.  Sooooo..... I gotta think this one out.  Maybe not do it in color?  I for sure don't want to do the book and have someone else illustrate it.  These characters need to look exactly the way I created them.  I know an in house illustrator is just gonna draw what THEY think and feel the characters should look like.  So... NOT... gonna.... happen here.  

I'm still going to work on this project, but not really urgently.  Still gotta make the other two girls, so I'm going to go ahead and do that.  Then, I'll see what path to try to take from there.  In the meantime, I have a ton of other projects that need to get done, so no worries!  Hopefully I'll end up making enough money from some of those to get the money to eventually produce this book myself!

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