Retouching, collaging and composing the drawings.
After sorting through my foot-tall stack of drawings, I begin selecting and editing my favorites. I also like to make collages to include as many students as possible.
Pictured above, I begin retouching the drawings. The first picture shows the original scan. You can see the line from the story on the top of the page and the students’ marker illustration of that concept, which shows a field of flowers toasting Ruby the Red Worm with a cup of tea.
The second drawing is a closeup depicting how I must delete the words from the illustration. I’ve also spent dozens of hours erasing pencil lines! Some drawings require an hour of retouching, particularly if I combine two or three illustrations. In this case, I removed the words and added additional cups of tea in all the flower’s hands.
Only 100 more to go!
Composition
Before and after an artful reconstruction. For some illustrations, I have to deconstruct character by character and reconstruct it into the proper shape that better illustrates the concept of the story. In this case, either the original 8.5 x 11″ drawing would have gotten too small for the 6 x 9″ final, or I would have had to crop off one or two kids. This drawing was done by Aldana Mediamolle, a student at the Kennedy Elementary School in Argentina.
