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, probably more when the backgrounds are added in.
I won't go into detail about the paintings here, since I may have discussed the process before. But I will say that it's very possible that we may have, say, less that twenty 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 early example of the page layout, showing one of the product lines "Gnome Gnog". There have been many improvements in the layout since this was done, but this give an idea of the look of the art. The page background is now different than this.
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.
Once 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
