Most of the damage from hurricane Helene is east of where I live. The town of Asheville seems devastated in areas near the rivers that run close to town. So much damage. Here the wind brought down leaves that were still green. I saw no trees down from those winds.
Earlier this week I invited two women from the neighborhood to come here and have some wine and snacks. It was a lovely visit. They wanted to know about the artworks in the house, so I talked about the stories behind the pieces. It was so nice to have such an interest in what I live with.
I loaned them copies of all the books now available on Amazon under the name, Sandy Webster and S. Webster. I am not into selling the books so much as having them available to those interested. I look forward to hearing what they think.
And this week I have been working on getting The Fairy Book in print. At first I thought a size a bit bigger than the original would work. But when the artist proof arrived, it was too large. I went back to a 5″ x 7″ book and it seems just right.
But looking closely at the images, I decided to make some color adjustments on some of them. Now the next artist proof arrives this coming Wednesday. If all looks okay, I will approve it for publication and it should be available in a couple of weeks.
This book was so much fun to illustrate. I used the generous gift from Lorraine O’Brien of books she printed with Eucalyptus leaves to contact print pages of concertina books. She is an Australian who has been in several of my classes there over the years. In these books she had a way of folding up cut corners to create pockets on each page. So when I photographed each page, the folded up triangle shows. It makes more sense in the original because you can reach inside or fold the pocket down. In the photographing to get the picture of each page, there is this odd diagonal line.
Also the issue was how to space the illustrations on pages that turn separately so that illustrations that connect could still appear to be connected. A border of one half inch solved the issue because the inside (gutter margin) sandwiches the images next to each other. I like how it looks now and especially how it feels in the hand.
It is the same size as Burke and Wills and Scrabble.
This is a short blog because not much is going on. So just a catch up. Hopefully more next week.
Til then….