Gardener's Thumbnails

Thursday, 3rd March 2005
Wild West Yorkshire nature diary

After spending a couple of days scanning I've assembled a folder (on my computer) of 135 garden images, 57 of those in colour. These are all taken from my main sketchbook for 2003, but there are at least a dozen more sketchbooks that I could take drawings from. I have far more material than I need for one book.

Window XP makes it easy to browse through thumbnails of the images (left) so I can quickly get an impression of the variety of drawings available.

Because most of the colour images are small and many of pen and ink drawings are big enough to go across a double page spread this means I'll need about a quarter to a third of the book in colour.

Colour Section

My printer says there are three options for introducing 32 pages of colour into the 96 page book I've got in mind:

1. A 32 page colour section (or two 16 page sections)

2. Four 16 page sections where every other double page spread is in colour (there are six 16 page sections in the book)

3. 'Wrapping' 16 page black white sections in 8 pages of colour (but this involves extra work and expense in collating the book)

Option number 2 comes nearest to the way I use colour in a real sketchbook. The printer is going to have a dummy of the A5 (about 6 x 8 inches) 96 page paperback made up for me, with an indication of where the colour spreads would fall.

I'm getting quite excited about being able to put together such a substantial book. I don't want to hurry it; I want to put a lot of thought into the design and the 'story', but I'm looking forward to having it in print and then - if it's a reasonable success - producing a second book in a similar format.

Sycamore and Snow

As I drive down into Huddersfield the surrounding moors above and beyond it look wilder than usual, capped with snow.

I've allowed myself plenty of time to get to my meeting so I sit in the car for 25 minutes and draw one of the bare sycamores in the grounds of Greenhead College (yes, it's that Staedtler mars professional 0.7 mm again).

Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk