Rosie's Progress

I've finished the drawings for a new revision of my picture book dummy, Rosie Sings. I'm excited to paint a few spreads and submit it! Doing the final artwork is my favorite part It seems like it takes about a minute to do after the looooooooong struggle of writing, drawing, rewriting, redrawing, and revising forever.

First I scanned my drawings, isolated the line art and placed it over a music collage that I'd already made and scanned into the computer. I printed that out onto my favorite paper, BFK Rives using my Epson printer.

This is what it looked like printed out on the BFK Rives.

Then I went over all of the lines with a fat black pencil. Next I'll add some hand made stamps and watercolor.

I wanted to try something different in a few spots in the book. So I carved stars into this hard rubber brayer. It's really difficult to do! The rubber doesn't cut as well as linoleum and carving on a round surface is tricky. But the stars are simple and I got it done. Now I can roll the brayer in transparent ink and roll that over my painted paper. I'm hoping I can get it so some of the background shows through. It will take some experimenting! Id like to use this star background  behind the scene with Mama holding and singing to Rosie.  I'll share the next stages of development soon!