Studio Housekeeping

Since I last posted here, I have sent off the art for BOOM BOOM, a 32-word picture book (each word is repeated once so it’s really 16 words, twice) by Sarvinder Naberhaus. It was a mad rush towards the end (it always is) and after I shipped it out, I felt joy, relief, and just a touch of fear (what if they don’t like it?…). Then the next day I came back to this:

What a mess!

Because the techniques I use involve many different tools and materials, things tend to spread out a bit.

My workspace gets kind of cluttered.

Pretty much every surface gets covered with something.

When I run out of horizontal space, I go vertical.

Since I usually am printing more than one image at a time, I need to have a lot of colors available on my inking table.

I try to keep them from drying out with saran wrap, and in order to keep track of what detail is which color, I started labeling the saved colors with a marker (and to keep track of the nine children I feature in the images, I gave them all names). All this needs to get scraped off and wiped clean.

And then I have to clean all my tools.

Plus there is the added detritus left from mounting the art and packing it up.

It feels good to be done with a large project like this at last, but also a little sad. I’ve enjoyed working on this book. I’ve lived with it for many months now. I will miss these characters and their world that I’ve made up, but I look forward to seeing them again, in a year or so, in their new home – the book itself.