Orange Monster

Ok so I have decided I want a copy of the Little Book of Spoogy Poetry to give to my little girl for Halloween this year – this gives me until the 31st of October which will hopefully be enough time!

What is involved with this?

One I need to make sure that all the spelling is correct with the poems and that they ‘work’ and wouldn’t be better with just a little tweaking (and as anyone who’s read my stuff for any amount of time will know spelling is not a strong point though I do try – honest!). The second part of this I can do by myself, the first part however has to go through my husband and then through my friend editor who is so lovely she manages to cram me in even though she is now managing several publications!

The next thing I need to do is to take the photos of the pictures into some program to sort them out – now I only really know how to use Illustrator and not very well at that (having been trained to construct maps on it rather than kids illustrations!), I also have The Gimp and Corel Draw something or other. I will see how I go with Illustrator first as it has work with me tracing photos before.

I will obviously work with the layer facility to get rid of the photo background easily. I will then tweak the pictures until I think they look good enough.

Then comes the fun bit of putting it all together and deciding on the exact page layout and stuff. This will probably then be converted to a PDF (though I need to do some research into this stage) and given either to something like LuLu.com or taken to local printers. This really depends on how big the thing turns out to be which I’ll work out by printing a rough copy and seeing basically. I really do want an ISBN for this but obviously for my little girls copy that doesn’t matter. I need to look into the costs of ISBN’s but I think it should be affordable as I do have people wanting to buy copies already!

I want this to look good and not actually homemade – it is going to be a lot of work but with the deadline there hopefully I’ll achieve something!

Last year I made my little girl a book of Halloween rhymes – she came up with the poetry concepts and helped me with some of the rhymes. The poems are here on Turquoise Monster where most poetry of mine ends up eventually!

I’ve mentioned this before on this blog I’m sure! But unfortunatly the little book I made her was destroyed in a small child (just turned 4 at the time) and water accident. I thought I’d lost it forever bar the rhymes but then I remembered that I had taken photos of all the pages too write a how to post on my Arts and Crafts Blog.

Here are all the photos! This makes things slightly harder for turning it into a an actual book/booklet but enough people have been asking me for a copy that I’m going to give it a shot 🙂

Please remember these were just rough drawings I did for my little one using her felt tips! The issue I have is that I was planning on scanning the pictures and working from them to make digital pictures but I only have the photos which are taken in not good lighting and at a variety of angles :/

But it is at least something to start on!

This will either be a 8+ book or maybe 12+ not sure which yet.

The premis is that a beach is haunted not sure if it is by an individual or a group or even if they are human/were human. It is a rough coast so there are many accidents and things. On holiday one of a group picks up a too large shell and listens for the sea in it. Through the shell he can hear the dead and they are calling to him.

This is going to be a chilling tail, but with a happy out come – not sure if that means just escaping or setting the beach free of its curse!

This is probably not going to be so much of a picture book as a kids book but it will still need a front cover! This I can already see with lots of dark tonal grey, slightly grainy.

This is just a board book idea, very basic – just runs through different types of milk, where they come from and what you can do with them!

This would include, goat, sheep, yak, oat, rice and soya!

It’s just an educational idea more than a story I think.

Toy trains get a lot of bashing and when finally they fall to pieces beyond any glue or they get lost they get to wake and become real trains, trains made of rubies, emeralds and sapphires! They live in a magic world where they are not always restrained to the tracks!

So far so good! I want to think on this idea a bit more I think – it’s a bit of a strange one.

These I see as a story about a child and her bath toy ducks who she tends to take out in the rain with her (this she calls Duck Suunshine) and play with on the pond in her back garden – except it is really a puddle on her patio!

This is a story I think I need to write first and then do the sketches for – but I do have a Winni the Pooh sort of feel for them – the origonal illustrations not Disney.

My husband has been telling my little girl a series of stories about a little girl called Coat (our daughter is very much an active part of making these stories up and she chose the name!), he then types these up!

Anyway he was looking for something to add into the stories so I have donated him one of my ideas – The Girl With The Long Pockets. This will either make a good older Coat (who currently has a magic coat but we know does grow out of it) or maybe a companion, another child of the same age to have adventures with!

One of the things that has happened is that a tooth fairy has appeared in one of the Hetty Peglar stories – she could be Hetty’s twin except she’s a fairy and not a witch – in practice this means she has wings and no pointed hat and that is about it!

Not only will she probably be appearing in future Hetty stories but my little girl lost her first tooth and wanted a story with a tooth fairy in that I had written – I dragged out the Hetty Peglar story. The result was Jeany wants more stories about the fairy :/

So one series has just spawned another! Eeek oh my!

My trilobite pictures are up on Art Evolved 🙂 There will be something about the drawings up on [Salaric Art and Craft])http://www.salaric.co.uk/) soonly I hope 🙂 about how I created the pictures!

There are also some excellent drawings/paintings/jewellery by others on there so I really suggest you go and look at it!

For those who don’t know I’m Sarah Snell-Pym so Trilobite! Dark Trilobite, Fimo Trilobite and Eco-bites are mine 🙂

I have started work on the pictures for What Can I See Under the Sea. I’ve decided to go for Acrylics as they are the medium I am most familiar with. I can also get the bright vivid colours I want with these paints easily. The only issue I have is that some of the animals I haven’t really drawn before so need to some pen and pencil practices for them!

Also some of my initial paintings have come out too dark – not a problem with pictures that go on your wall but it is for ones going into a book :/

I do have a slight fear that these paintings aren’t going to scan well due to the texture of the paint – light reflecting off of the brush marks – that type of thing. I can only try and see and maybe I can alter the images digitally if need be!