Self-publishing ‘Let’s Visit New Hope,’ Part 3: Dummy Book

The new children’s book ‘Let’s Visit New Hope’, written by Gayle Goodman and Roy Ziegler and illustrated by me, Pat Achilles, has just been released by the New Hope Historical Society. We used Amazon’s online publishing service, Createspace, to publish it.  This series of posts will follow the steps in the creation of the book.  

In my previous post I showed the thumbnail stage of designing this children’s book.  Once this step was finished I could further develop the basic sketches into actual-page-size sketches.  Our book’s page dimensions are 8.25″ x 8.25″, so I made double-page-spread sized sheets and drew the sketches with more detail than the thumbnails.  They are still somewhat loose because things can change once we see everything together.  Here are a few dummy book pages (you can click on each to enlarge):

You’ll see, these sketches will all change somewhat by the time the finished art is complete.  I also created a sketch for the front/back cover of the dummy:

Which was soon revised to this – can you see the change?

With the authors’ agreement, we decided to keep the title typeface reminiscent of M. Sasek’s wonderful travel books.  At this point I photocopied and stapled together several copies of the dummy book so that the authors could distribute them to potential donors to the project. This gave everyone involved a good idea of what the final book would include and look like.

Next I’ll show some of my processes to create the finished art for the book.

You can obtain author-and-illustrator signed copies of ‘Let’s Visit New Hope’ by ordering through through the New Hope Historical Society’s website at http://www.newhopehs.org. My next post coming soon: Sketches into Finished Art. Previous posts are on my blog, just scroll through https://achillesportfolio.wordpress.com/pencilled-in/ .   If you want to read future posts as they are published, subscribe to my blog by clicking on the +Follow box at the lower right of your screen and you will get email notifications when I have posted the next article.