Retouching and collaging
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.
As you can see in the above picture. The first illustration shows the original scan. You can see the line from the story at the top of the page and the students’ marker illustration of that concept. In this case, it is a field of flowers toasting Ruby the Red Worm with a cup of worm tea. (By the way, worm tea is a plant fertilzer made by steeping worm castings (manure) in water, extracting beneficial microbes.)
The second drawing is a close-up of the fiinal image. The blue lines are my guides. I have to get everything to fit inside these.
The drawings can require a lot of clean-up. I’ve also spent dozens of hours erasing pencil lines before I scan the images! This one isn’t too bad, but you’ll notice the drawing overlaps the words. I love when the student’s ad lib. I often add their lines to the story. In this case, I decided to set the words in type, which I will do in the next step.
If you have keen eye, you’ll notice some other subtle changes that I made to better illustrates the concept of the story.
Composition or recomposing the drawings
The kids all draw on a piece of regular letterhead. So, to get the illustrations to fit in the book, I have to change the aspect ratio from the original 8.5 x 11″ piece of paper to the 6 x 9″ final trim size of the book.
For some illustrations, I have to deconstruct the image and artfully reconstruct it into the proper shape. If I hadn’t done that either, I would have had to reduce the image, which would have made some of the detail disappear, or I would have had to crop off one or two kids.
The drawing below is a page from Cayendo Hacia Arriba, the Spanish edition of Falling Uphill for kids.
