Pulling the manuscript together

I’m pulling together the last strands of my manuscript project. I’m assembling the last illustrations. I’ve done the preliminary page layout. Now I’m adjusting the lines of lettering and the photo sizing for each page.

I delivered a couple of old photos from the age of film to Holland Photo for scanning. One is faded, and it will have its color refreshed. The other is black and white, and it will be colorized. Almost all the other photos are from the digital age.

This morning, I took new pictures of my breakfast cooking. The picture I had was a vertical, and I needed a horizontal. More important, the picture I had was too dark. Sometime I will tell you all about my dislike of the black stove in my apartment. I fixed it with some white parchment paper. Looks good, I think.

I need to practice with the watercolors in preparation for coloring an illustration from a woodcut. It’s Flammarion, a really spectacular drawing from the 1800s. My watercolor ability is pretty crude, so we’ll see how long it takes and how it turns out.

I had thought about highlighting some words of the text with watercolor, and I tried it on the last draft. It was a disappointment. So, not doing that.

The page layout went pretty well. I stumbled a lot figuring out how to use Affinity Publisher, but I’m getting the hang of it. I’ll write more about that soon, too.

I had a run of the pages, with only the pictures, printed on plain paper. I’m using those and written pages from a previous draft to adjust picture size and text placement for the final manuscript. First, I lay the draft on the lightpad. Then I lay the photo layout over it. I can see it all. Then I figure out how I want to fit everything together.

You can see (squint at it) by the photo of the sheets on the lightpad that the lettering sheet shows through the photo sheet, so it’s easy to fit them together into a composite image. (You can also see the sad results of my watercolor attempt.) In that composite, the page-head photo covers part of two lines of print, so I’ll have to get creative about that.

Some time this week I intend to put the final photo layout file on a flash drive and take it to Miller Imaging. They will print it on some high quality paper. I haven’t chosen the paper yet.

Once I have the good sheets with the photos on, I’ll sit down to do the final lettering. I’m aiming for this coming weekend or the following. I’m getting excited about it.