75 pages and counting

A favorite gallery scene that will appear in catalog.  How many rectangles?

A recent visitor to my house (who shall remain nameless) made light of my efforts to get the catalog done, teasing me for taking so long. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that was an unfair assessment of what Elizabeth and I are doing. This is no brochure. This is a full fledged catalog of the entire exhibit. And it will be a thing of beauty when it is done. Granted it has taken some time, but we have sifted through nearly 600 photographs taken for this show, finding the best image for each of the 52 pieces that hung in the gallery, plus detail images for much of the art. We are also including 30 or more gallery scenes such as the one above that features work (L-R) by Irit, Fabienne and Rio.

Before we even started, we took some time to select fonts that we liked and made sure that they would work in print or e-book format. Each of the photos selected has had to be color corrected and then plugged into a custom layout. Blurb offers a nice array of layout choices, but many pages have been modified or built from scratch and all of them have been done one at time--importing the photos as needed. Each photo is tried out and adjusted for size and often cropped on the page, a nice feature that Blurb offers. We've discovered a few of the photos, for one reason or another, have been too low res, so tomorrow I'm actually going to rephotograph a couple of Elizabeth's pieces and Rio is sending a higher res image of one of her pieces for which we neglected to get a detail. There is always something...

Each piece of art has to have the correct caption and captions are in a different size font and style so we are constantly proofreading to be sure we are consistent and once in a blue moon there is not enough space, so the page has to be adjusted--a font made smaller or a picture resized to accommodate the information. For those of you who live in a metric world, we are converting all dimensions so that we all can know the sizes.  Elizabeth and I don't always agree on the outcome of a particular page, so there has been compromise and editing as we go along. She can spot a comma dilemma from 20 paces and keeps me on my toes for professional writing.  We will soon be proofreading the heck out of this--Elizabeth was an illustrator and graphic designer for 25 years in her former life and I taught yearbook for 14 years along with teaching art for 25 years, so we know how to design and we know how to spot mistakes--and we so want this book to be perfect. 

Elizabeth and I agonized for a week or more at the beginning writing the introduction to the book for which we have a dazzling panorama of the gallery--can't wait for you all to see it. Each of the artists contributed an artist statement that is being included--and an additional statement for a special piece--something that was not offered in the gallery.  And of course all of that information has to be typed into the text boxes on the pages. 

Last I counted, there were over 75 pages with a 1000 MB file to go along with them.  I like that Blurb is easy to use.  I have run into a few glitches along the way as I mentioned in my last post, but I've had Blurb support helping.  We are in the last stretch of creating.  I hope we'll be able to announce the publication of the book very soon.  Thank you so much for your patience.  I hope you'll think it's been worth the wait. 

Here's to kicking off the new year with a bang!