Saturday, April 15, 2017

Astro Resist/story

Astro is the cover model for Baby's First Resist-story--the last of several titles for our ABC book (and I know it's the final one because now it's been inked).

Astro is the most attentive dog I've ever known---here he is checking on what his person bink is doing in the bathroom sink (she's washing off the resist):

Each illustration, though drawn by one of us, is truly a collaboration--we spent more time kicking around ideas of how to illustrate some of the letters than we spent making the illustration itself.
 
We mostly used pop-culture references, but for the cover decided to use something personal: Astro. 
I traced onto a board my photo of Astro running around with my sock, bink added a streamer, and I painted the wash-away white parts--bink did the final steps of inking and washing (because we're doing these at her house and the paint and ink have to dry between steps, and I'm not there for all of that).

It needs some tweaking. bink scans and makes the final touch-ups in the Pro-create program on her iPad [here displaying some of the other pages]:

This has been a great Despair-Management-in-Trumptimes project. It was meant to be a quickie-project to do in the two weeks I was waiting for the editor to return my book, but it's taken closer to two months--that's been a good thing.

We're almost, almost done.
Today bink printed all the  illustrations and made a mock-up of the final zine. It looks better than I'd expected--like I said, it'd started as a throw-it-together project but ended up taking a lot of brain and hand work. I'm really pleased with it, in fact.

Hm. What shall we do next?

UPDATE: Maura just sent me this photo. I like Astro, Astro likes me:

3 comments:

Laura B said...

This is so great!!!! Will look forward to seeing it all put together..

deanna said...

Kudos to you all for making lemonade when you see lemons.

I love the pictures of Astro; the one with you is super!

Fresca said...

Thanks, Laura & Deanna!
We're almost done (you know, the last 10%...).