Are the Q Pages Finsihed, You Ask? Yes, Quite!

I really have to stop trying to come up with catchy titles for these posts about my ABC Book pages.  This one was a little lame, I'll admit.

But the Q's are quite done, and I am quite happy about it!

Before I show you the Q pages, I want you to know that I kind of cheated again.   Not really, but sort of.  I scanned and copied some old artwork of mine, because I was too lazy to try to recreate it all over again.  (Mea culpa!)

The original children's alphabet book that I started about 25 years ago for my youngest son and then abandoned completely after I'd finished just 10 of the illustrated pages (only to dust it off many years later and start working on it again when I became a grandmother) was somewhat problematic.  The artwork was done on very large pieces of paper, and it would have been necessary to shrink the pages down to fit a printed book format--which in my crazy pipe dreams, the children's book publisher was going to do for me.  The pages were also hand-lettered, because it was the olden days and I didn't have a PC with Word on it and therefore didn't have the ability to make the text look utterly professional.

Here is one of those original pages, with my big old size 9 feet nearby to give you perspective.

The first time around, each letter was going to have three pages of illustrations; but having gotten older and wiser, this time around, I decided that there were only going to be two pagers per letter.  (I mean, look how many years it's already taken me to move this project along--and I'm 60 now, as of yesterday. I figured there was a lot more hope of actually finishing this book for my grandchildren before I kick the bucket if I cut down the number of pages.)  I really liked those ducks and wanted to use them again, but I'd already completed my two new pages of D's.  What to do, what to do?

Well, one solution would be coming up with a new rhyme for one of the other letters where a picture of ducks would fit right in.  So that is what I did, and this is how my 25-year-old ducks played their new part in my soon-to-be-completed (hopefully!) ABC Book.

Boo-yah!  Yes, that just happened!

The new pages are drawn on 8 and 1/2 by 11-inch card stock, so they are much more manageable.  I print out the text first using Word and then do the artwork around it. The queen is all fresh and new; but those ducks were scanned and copied from the original book, and then glued into place under the text.

When I first decided to finally finish this long-neglected book as a gift for my grandchildren, I meticulously redid the artwork that I wanted to reuse.  It was painstaking--because it's extremely difficult to try to recreate a drawing that you liked as is the first time around.

Well, no more of that!  It's way too time intensive, and I have to get this thing done while my precious little ones are still young enough to be enthralled by alphabet books!

There is a part of me that thinks my queen needs a bit more tweaking, but I'm going to try to let the urge to improve her go and just move on; I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I think I actually might get this thing finished before 2018 is over.  Stay tuned...