Update on the Publishing Layout

 UPDATE 8/25/26

Two of the prototype 2D "Garden Gnomes"
good for indoor plants and outdoor gardens.
The Gnomette is "Meg" and the Gnoman is "Bubba"

   The Publishing Layout: 

    The book layout is nearing completion. I'm finding out that; saving the more complex illustrations for last is proving to be more taxing then I thought to complete. It's slow going when on illustration uses six to ten (or more) watercolor paintings to craft. A major issue right now is how to achieve consistency and accurate color rendition in the final printing. I am leaning toward installing a print shop in the studio, but that comes with a plethora of other details and expenses that need to be tended to.  I am also doing research on engaging a fulfillment firm to oversee book publication and distribution.

    It is important that I move away from the publishing aspect and move into the music and theatre aspect of this project. I can say that the signed Limited Editions will remain in-house at all times and I do believe that the hand-stitched edition may also be distributed directly from IMS.  It all depends on how this pans out. My previous efforts are jobbing out the printing did not work out the way I had hoped, mainly because the firms I was dealing with wanted to produce the books they way they wanted to, not in accordance with my designs (mostly in terms of binding and production quantities).

   The other activity that is beginning to take place is Animation. In order to keep Jency employed on this project, we will be engaging in classic animation. I'm having thoughts that I could use Ai to enhance some basic animation. (See the Ai sample below). So we are taking some basic scenes and drawing cells for the animation. My thinking is to do (for instance) 8:1 animation cells and let the Ai fill in the gaps. That's all up-in-the-air right now, but if another production compny wants to be involved in this process,  contact me through the web page; www.imageofthemindstudios.org (I need to start using that page more often) or use the links on this blog.

ARCHIVE (edited)

   The photos here represent a few of the work-stations that are currently dedicated to publishing and artwork. I'll add more photos later.

 

   As I have repeatedly said "It's almost done".  Well, relatively speaking that is true. I now have less than one binder of artwork that yet needs to be prepared and inserted into the layout, but the volume of those binders is largely due to the fact that there are multiple paintings that make up the illustrations for the few remaining pages requiring artwork. 

   It is most interesting that my prep work for making the paintings ready to be inserted into the books takes five times more work than actually creating the sketches and paintings. But that's just the way it is.

   So now we are going back to "placeholder" artwork and redoing it. Some paintings were not of the caliber that I wanted, but we used it anyway so we could move on. My goal is to keep Jency working on other aspects (sculpting & animation in particular) so I am addressing redrawing/painting some of the artwork, mostly to make sure that the look of the character's faces is consistent. Sometime it is hard to keep the look "right" when one is drawing the characters from different angles and trying to express an assortment of emotions. So some of it needs to be redrawn.

   But also, I inserted characters into the pages, in numerous instances, without backgrounds. So I am now crafting more backgrounds for the scenes. I figure we will need those backgrounds for the animation, but also, they will be used as backdrops for the stage show.

   The two images above are photos of the first stage model that I used when I first started writing the Libretto. I used it to determine blocking as I was writing. It's very primitive, but it helped. The clay gnomes started out with the features you see here, but that changed when Jency started drawing the characters. I'll get into that process in another post.

   In regard to the stage show; I have it in my mind to secure an LED (or digital) backdrop as part of the hard supplies for the stage show. My intention is to put a stage in my studio, wherever my final location ends up being. I started building the stage, but difficulties at my present location has prevented me from advancing with that. I will address the studio on the IMS Virtual Studio. This link takes you to my "main portal". Other links will be present there.

    I am also crafting a more functional Business Plan. It is based on all the other elements that have been discussed, but now I have decided to sell options for the major markets. Ownership of "The Gnomes..." And other projects will always remain with IMS, but I do expect to sell the studio outright when I am too old to be effective. (That's creeping up on me, ugh)

   So, the options will be for, production in the four primary arenas (Publishing, Theatre, Film, Television), distribution in those markets (contracted to a degree through production), and merchandizing individual Ancillary Markets. Marketing will be largely contracted, but supervised by The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture.

   I will be turning over 40% of all rights (and management) to The Elder Gnomes Joint Venture, who will hold the rights for a set renewable term, but not ownership. Ownership remains with Image of the Mind Studios, ad infinum. To possess ownership, it is contingent upon buying IMS outright. As I have mentioned, I will be posting the details to this Business Plan on the IMS Management or Producing Partners blogs (after the publishing layout is done, done.) 

   In the meanwhile, I am open to discussing any of this with persons interested in these affairs. I do expect to secure a Literary and/or Theatrical Agent, once the books are ready for distribution to Industry Professionals. 

   The licensing of any rights will be contingent final upon negotiations through my agent, although we can set the groundwork ahead of time and I can discuss the terms of a straight-forward and simple Option. However, I will not engage in legal manipulation or rhetoric in this regard and any final agreements must be cleared with the appropriate legal or other representatives. (sad to say). I do expect that legitimate business dialogue can take place in an environment free from complexity, given the right circumstances.

AG

Parade Float Update

UPDATE 8/26

   Work has advanced on the Parade Float. A new front suspension has been acquired and is ready for installation (sans the brakes) the metal for re-fabricating the chassis in areas where rust has decayed it's strength has been acquired and is on the welding table. Components of the stage sub-structure and cradles are being gathered as well as the stage itself (in the form of 5 4x8 platforms). No work on the engine or controls will be done until the chassis is sufficiently strengthened (see diagrams below).  Discussions and consideration regarding the animatronic aspect of the Gnomes of New Hope display are under way, but serious address of those elements will not occur until after the Storybook publication is underway, as that also involves puppetry and is connected in some degree to work on animation (as to content selection for marketing).

ARCHIVE

§   This year's Southampton Days Parade, which takes place on July Fourth, is in the planning stages. As much as I had hoped that this Parade Float would have been ready, sadly, that's not going to happen.

§   The truck that was acquired for this purpose was in very much more poor condition than I had expected. That means the rebuild will be more extensive and costly than I had anticipated. Components of the truck which I had planned on reusing will have to be replaced, in particular, the entire front suspension. But also, all the control cables and braking systems. It gets down to a complete rebuild, to the point of pulling the power train and rear suspension. All of this bring more complexity, time and cost. But it needs to be done if the end product will be safe, trouble free and serve a long term functionality.

§.   I have a source of numerous additional trucks if it turns out that more than one self-propelled parade floats needs to be built.

ARCHIVE:

   The templets for repair panels have been made and those panel are being quoted. 

   Here are the drawings for the Parade Float. Current activity is preparing the chassis for paint and reinforcement. The initial goal was to have the Parade Float functional in time for the Fourth iof July Parade. Truthfully however, I doubt that that will be possible. In addition to finishing the technicalities of the float itself, there is the issue of designing and constructing a presentation for the parade and then producing it (ie: actors costuming sets, materials etc,). So our goal is to just get the Parade Float/Portable stage constructed and functional (mainly for use with The Gnomes of New Hope).

    When the Parade Presentation for the Gnomes is under way, then plan is for Animatronic characters to be part of the Parade Float. We'll see how that goes. One step at a time. For now we need to finish the Parade Float and to assure that it is functional as imagined.

 In regard to Animatronics, we have advanced with building the parade float.

  

    Here you see the chassis that is being used for the parade float. It will be strengthened and rebuilt. It is the chassis of a Corvair truck the section in the back contains the power-plant and the section in front (center) will contain a cockpit for the operator. The operator will be seated under the stage. We are working on designing an animatronic puppetry presentation for the parade float.

     I was in Ohio recently and while there I bought a new front suspension for the parade float. The existing suspension is unusable due to rust, however, it will stay in place until the frame is strengthened in the critical areas, which likewise have severe corrosion that have cause the integrity of the chassis to fail. Even so, strengthening of the frame would be required in any event, because the chassis was part of the unibody, which depended upon other body panels for strength. The frame area need to be boxed and other support modification need to be made. Preparations to effect those changes are being made over the winter, with welding to taken place after the weather lets up and becomes warmer. 

Here is the Meadow Amphitheater,
where we performed as 
The Shakespeareans of Tamanend Park

   
   I have begun prepping the chassis for paint and welding support struts. As you can see above, the chassis will accommodate standard 4x8 stage platforms and not only serve as a Parade Float, but also the core of a mobile stage which can be set up in a festival or park environment.  Thinking in that direction is a result of what happened with the stage that was built in Tamanend Park, being destroyed by vandals. With this portable stage, we can take the stage with us and not leave it exposed to nefarious deeds. I expect to try to emulate the stage that was built for Tamanend Park, with wing extensions that can be added to all four sides of the Parade Float/Mobile Stage.  We may even consider a modular backdrop scenario as an accessory to the stage.

AG

Thoughts on Book Publishing (+Garden Gnomes)

Above is one of our new Garden Gnomes
and two others below.
I'm developing a collection of these "flat" displays
from hundreds of watercolor character paintings used in
The Illustrated Storybook Series

These products will be available once I post them in a "Shopping Cart"
 on 
www.imageofthemindstudios.org

 

     In calculating what kind of printing operation I would need to set-up for an on-demand printing operation, it seems quite clear to me that if I do enter into a printing operation, managing those affairs will distract from the work that needs to be done on the Stage Musical and other work on Animation & Puppetry. 

  The kind of printing press that needs to be used for this project is something that may be a bit beyond my immediate thinking, in regard to expanding my studio printing capabilities. I say this, not because it is beyond my capabilities, but because entering into that degree of printing, in terms of quality and consistency, will distract my operation away from the primary goals, because I will need to be focused on the production line.  

    I will be expanding the printing operation for an assortment of purposes, including Limited Edition copies of the books, printing the Musical Score/Libretto and other prototype & Limited Edition materials, but larger quantity publication for Retail Distribution requires a higher quality printing presses than I think it is advisable to maintain at this time. 

    It remains a possibility depending on circumstances and expense, but the initial expansion of our capabilities will, by necessity, be limited to smaller production quantities with printing equipment that is less capable of consistent quality on high production quantity.

   That being the case, I invite larger scale printers and publishers to discuss this project with me, because I expect that I will not be able to meet sudden large scale demand, should that occur.

AG

July thoughts on the Progress

​

 For those of you wondering what’s going on with the books… well they really are almost finished.  As far as I can see, all the artwork required for the illustrations is finished. 

   There are a few pieces which might be redone, because some of the early sketches were used for the sake of expediency, but they are not of a quality equal to the better illustrations. 

   I can say that; less than a dozen pages need to be done. However, the entire layout needs to inspected (again for the fiftieth time) to make sure everything matches. 

   I can say that the overall layout will need to have each page adjusted to match the quality control required for color balance and saturation which is provided by the printing press used. Because of this, setting up a printing operation in-house is under consideration. Experience with publishing prototype runs shows that, not only quality control, but also production expenses, will be easier to monitor and control either an on-demand press in the studio. Doing this will consolidate operations for printing, binding, inventory, sales and shipping. Sadly, jobbing out smaller quantities is prohibitive because of inconsistent quality (between multiple printers and the press operators) compounded markups, travel, handling and, frankly, lack of security over controlling publication and hence, the actual quantity of books produced.

So, the current efforts are both creating the last few illustrations (which often require multiple painting to achieve, due to the detail required) and the effort to inspect and correct the pages that were not properly prepared. I am surprised how many painting were not detailed properly to accommodate the effects, that later on, were added into the layout. Those paintings/illustrations need to be properly detailed in order to match the current quality specifications.

All in all, the entire series is truly almost finished and I am beginning to work on the boxes for the boxed set, but the specification as to dimensions cannot be finalized until the entire set is properly finished and bound. The reason for this is that each book is a different width, depending on the number of pages per book. Since the books published in the first run are hand stitched, that is a factor as well.

That all for now. AG

Contact re; Purchasing Books

The full collection of "Big People Books" is actually nearing completion. Even though I have said this before, this time it is very close to being a reality, finally!

I will be setting up a print shop, so that we will have complete control over quality and quantity.

The "Gnome Sized Books" will be worked on after all the registrations are complete.

The registrations are pending, although have been started. So all of this will determine the actual release of the books to the public.

However, since my main email is deluged with nonsense emails, I have another email for use in communicating regarding purchase of the books. It is:

imagemindag.publishing@gmail.com

Any email sent to the above address that addresses any subject other than the books or publishing activities will be deleted and blocked.

I also have purchased numerous domains for IMS and the portal for those sites is;

imageofthemindstudios.org

There is a contact form there, but I have not begun using that on a regular basis yet, but it should work.

AG

Status Report 3/26/26

Most Recent Activity:

   For the last month there have been activities surrounding facilities that have interfered with the work on completing the layout. But I managed to relocate my workstation and archives and proceeded to prepared the finished artwork for insertion into the layout. This has prompted me to seek to duplicate my workstation to avoid this in the future.

   Truthfully, I am beginning to feel burned out on trying to complete these books. It is SO close to being finished that I must fight the urge to just quit and work on my cars.

   I was very happy to see that Book Five looks to be complete. Two days ago, rather that work on the art, I was reviewing the technical details of the page layout and making corrections to assure that the pages all matched. I figured discover (again) that the earlier artwork I had installed was not properly prepared and needed to be gone over to be trimmed in order to accommodate the effects that are now being used (but we're not at the time the art was installed). I found this situation has occurred on many pages. With the more recently prepared artwork I have been much more detail oriented. This is in large part because we have been thinking in terms of 3D animation and the paintings must not have artifacts that will translate into the animation.

The First Page of Book One

     

ARCHIVE:

  You will note that below I posted video conversations that took place three years ago. Overall that still applies. What has been happening since then you can see in other posts below. Let me just say that in all this time we have been both designing and redesigning (when necessary) the artwork. Just yesterday, I asked Jency to redo the illustration for a particular page, because in looking at the proceeding and following pages, I felt that we needed a greater diversity in the posture of the characters. In fact, there are a few illustrations that will need to be done over because the characters drawn do not have the kind of consistency and detail that I feel is needed. So in those instances, the artwork is just place holding, while the collection is completed.

§   Five Binders of finished artwork that has been inserted into the layout. There are more.

§    I'm pretty well certain that there are around a dozen pages left to do. Some pages are half finished, the ones that use multiple paintings to create the illustration panel. Once the last page is illustrated with the characters, then we will be going back to review and assess the backgrounds. Along the way I decided to make sure the characters were placed, even without a background. In some instances no background is necessary. But for diversity's sake, and depending on the shift of environment in the story, a backdrop is appropriate or required. But in order to complete the layout, insertion of the characters has had to have taken precedence over the background. Indeed, we have an excellent collection of quite detailed paintings of the environments where the story taken place, but I discovered (after creating those paintings) that there really isn't enough room in the books to show those backdrops to the story. In some instances there is room, but by the time those environments are reduced to the slotted space on the page, the detail is lost. So this collection of art will really be shown in the context of the exhibition.

§   Work has been done on these exhibition panels, but the significant progress on assembling the Exhibition must wait for the book layout to be completed. I will discuss the exhibition at another time and, in fact, will assemble the exhibition as an online presentation, for those that cannot travel to where it is physically presented. That online exhibition will be generally (in part) available for publicity, but in whole will be available by subscription. Sort of an entrance fee, like a ticket to the show. I will discuss this as it proceeds.

That's all for now.  AG

Conversations about the Gnomes

    I did this three years ago! 

I took these from my YouTube page, which I am only now starting to use.

 The Seven books in the collection are actually 768 pages long, not 900.

Part Two;

Part Three;

Sorry for the colorful language at one point.

 Since these videos were done three years ago, we are very much further along by now.

I believe I am down to the last dozen pages or so that need to be finished.

The next stage is to prepare the layout for the printer.

Now, contrary to what I said in the last video, I am considering setting up IMS Publishing with a print shop. I went thru a lot of difficulty in trying to set a MSRP for the books. Numerous printers were interested in the project, but I need the price per page to be a fixed amount in order to set the project up with proper wholesale pricing that locks in a margin for each step along the production pathway. Well, I am no finding printers willing to give me the right price. So that mens we have two choices; web printing or setting up an on-demand print shop. Considering the amount of printing that is needed for other items, Libretto, music score, other publishing projects... setting up a print shop seems like the best option. We'll see what happens. I'm leaning toward licensing the machine bound books to a reputable organization, but the licensing fees will need to be paid up front, based on a minimum quantity. I'll get into the detail of that later and post that on the IMS Management Page, which is a private page for business parters as is IMS Producing Partners, where other details are posted.

That' all for now... folks !

AG

Publishing Update

  NOTE: a few keys on my laptop do not work, so letters are missing or tyyyping the wrong character. I will have to fix this on a different computer.

As I have so often said "It's almost finished" and what I also sayid is "Almost doesn't count". So I won't do that. But I am satisfied about the progress.

   All the illustrations in this collection of Seven Books are watercolors that have taken a great deal of effort to achieve. Taking a guess at it, I'd estimate that the total number of paintings exceeds two thousand, I think more when the backgrounds are added in. 

   I won't go into detail about the paintings here, since I have discussed the process before. But I will say that it's possible that we have, less that 20 to do. I have eight or ten sketches that need to be painted, but I know that there are some illustrations that I would like to do over, because I want, either a different design, or better detail.

   

    This is an old version of the page layout, showing one of the product lines "Gnome Gnog". There have been quite a few improvements in the layout since this was done, but this gives an idea of the look of the art. The page background is now different than this. You can see below that a twine edge has been added.

   So, what are we up to? Well, I have two three inch binders with finished watercolors and I have been slowly scanning, prepping and inserting that art into the layout. I'm happy that this stage of the process is going more quickly than creating the art. I also have a binder of unfinished pages that give a quick view of what needs to be finished. That binder contains little over a dozen pages in it. But I also am using the digital files, which are color coded, to comprehend what pages are unfinished. The entire collection amounts to about 768 pages (give or take). I pages in the books that are not part of the page numbers, which are basically inserts. (Such as below)

   Now, after all the artwork has been installed, I will need to review the entire layout to make sure the effects used in the latter (improved) pages is also used on all the other pages. To explain this statement; I have used a stroke and a drop shadow on certain paintings, in particular, the illustrations that are built out of numerous paintings. The effect this has is to make the characters "pop" out of the page. But when I started doing this I did not have these effects refined for the proper balance. So, I need to go back and inspect the pages so they all match. After that is achieved, I can then build the files for the printing press.

   

Now, I did publish a prototype run of books one thru four, but stalled on book five, because that book is bigger than all the others. The reason for that is that Book Five contains references to "The Gnomic Tales" and those tales comprise five other stories. 

   "The Gnomes of New Hope; Zach and Zebby's Grand Adventure" 

is one story that spans seven books. Each book consists of between 90 and 160 pages, depending on the segment. The chapters in the books match the scenes in the stage musical, upon which the Illustrated Storybooks are based. 

   Now these Illustrated Storybooks are designed to also serve as "storyboards" for a film version of the story. So the publishing layout is an adaptation of the storyboard concept used in filmmaking.

   The intention is to produce an animated film using the illustrations in the Storybooks. The beginning of this process is to produce the illustrations as GIFs, which will be used in the e-Storybook. These GIFs will be the foundation of larger scenes in the animated film.

  

  After the books are in distribution, producing income, the effort to advance animation and a theatrical production will advance. In the meanwhile, sample and prototype materials will be generated as best as possible, given resources available.

That's all for now.

AG