The making of a book

I'm working away on the book, in old-school fashion. Very much a paper and pen person, I usually draw all my talks or writing via bits of paper rather than all onscreen - despite my 20+ years expertise with Adobe!

How to organise several years of sketchbooks? I scanned all the pages, then printed every scan at a small scale, and cut them out. Put them into piles by topic - in this case points along the Whitby to Saltwick walk. Notes typed on the computer are also printed out. (I used Evernote for this book's text.)

Cut out laserprints

Then I paste them in a big notebook! Using a moveable spray mount so I could change my mind and swap things around.

Past-up book

Mort the dragon also "helps" with putting the paper paste-up layouts into InDesign on the computer.

This book holds my ideas for the 2-page spreads within the book. Arranged in order of things I see on the walk, in order, from Whitby to Saltwick. As I put the drawings and notes into the actual book design, better arrangements might come up - for example these two pages of drawings of the Dogger ironstone.

Dogger pages - from first idea to final book pages.

As well as old-school notes and paper, I'm prolific with post-it notes too. I can find no better way to bookmark and organise quantities of information. As you can see from this photo of me drafting an art and astronomy talk in the past!

Click and find out more about the book "Saltwick: An Artist's Notebook"