Behind the Scenes of the Heart Beyond the Clouds
From a poem to paintings, this book was anything but easy. The project took me nearly 8 months from writing the story to publishing. Forming the story in my head didn’t take long, but it was the illustrations that took the majority of the time.
After sketched, each illustration had to go through a test painting. It’s where I paint the illustrations quickly to see how the colors and the placement of the elements and the text would work. Once all were visually satisfied and confirmed, I then started the actual painting. Some of the paintings had to be done a few times to get it right. Watercolor can be an unforgiving medium, especially when you want to create the loose and flowy, soft blend look.
This being my first published book, there were a lot of rookie mistakes that I learned along the way. The first major one was that I painted all illustrations on cold-pressed watercolor papers. It’s a type paper with a semi rough texture that holds water well and gives artists time to blend the colors and making artistic effects. It was a joy to paint on cold-pressed papers and it’s a type of paper that I’m most familiar with and the paintings look amazing in real life because of the texture.
Once I finished all of the illustrations, I was elated! However, the joy was short-lived. When I did the scanning, they came out super grainy, (something I should have thought about beforehand). The printed illustrations seemed low-quality and fading on a print book. Correcting the colors and the texture digitally didn’t help much at all. The texture was too rough and was too distracting for my taste. I even purchased a new scanner and it still didn’t help.
I had to make a very tough decision to repaint every single illustration! And I’m not going to lie. I cried for a couple of days when I knew that I had to do it.
It took extra 1-2 months. And the paper texture after scanning and color grading was much better. The colors and tones felt right for the story. The printed illustrations felt clean and clear as expected for the print book.
Through all that, I’m very happy with how it all turned out. I hope that in the future I get to do a special edition with gold foil stamp on the title, etc. But so far, the current edition is incredible and suffice for a first time self-publish author, like me.
Thank you for reading my very first blog! I hope you stick around to see more of my upcoming picture books!
Tasha ❤️