The cover of my new book has finally headed out to the printer. While I had drawn the illustration two years ago (of my friend Julie Dermansky's studio in upstate New York, just a weeks or two before it was destroyed by a tornado), there were many steps to climb before the cover reaches the window of every Barnes & Noble in the nation and the desks of the Pulitzer committee. If you can bear it, I'll go through them briskly.
Illusration: When I did the drawing, I was under the illusion that it would be good to work large; I forget why, maybe I was inspired by Julie's huge canvases. So I worked on a 14 x17 bristol pad pad, sitting on an upended compound bucket. When I was done, Julie brought out here Canon Rebel digital camera and we shot picture of the journals she made on her year on a grant to draw monumental European sculpture (many of the pages appear in the book) and it seemed an easy enough thing to throw the studio drawing on the camera stand too.
When I examined the images on my computer at home, the journal pix looked great, capturing the texture and warmth of the handmade journals. But the cover image needed to be a lot crisper and cleaner and the shots we'd made wouldn't do. Eventually this image will have lots of uses, being turned into posters, sweatshirts, and hot air balloons. It'll have to be blown up to a huge size to plaster on the outside of the Everyday Matters corporate 747 and for the ten-story billboard Disney'll be putting up in Times Square and on the Las Vegas strip. We'll need the highest quality art for the framed copy to hang in Hillary's Oval Office and for the opening credits of The Creative License TV show, not to mention the DVD boxes.
The big drawing didn't fit on my scanner and Hyperion started bugging for a cover comp for the catalog so I put the drawing on my paper cutter and neatly bisected it once then again. The quarters fit fine on the scanner and then I spent an hour reknitting them together in Photoshop.
My author photo was taken in San Francisco by the genius Andrea Scher. She took a lot of hilarious and (considering they were of me) beautiful pictures in the alley outside my pad, Balmy Casa, last summer.
Originally the book was to have what are called french flaps, just like the dust jacket of a hardcover back, but a few weeks ago, we discovered that to do so would be to add two dollars to the retail price of the book. I am committed to having this book be affordable ��it has two hundred pages of full color illustrations but it's full list price is only $16 � so I agreed that we should ditch them. All of the copy and pictures on the flap now had to go onto the back cover and all of the original content had to be scrapped.
Meanwhile, we were working on another critical part of any self-respecting book jacket: the blurbs, the puffed up quotes from reviewers, celebrities, authority figures, cool people, anyone who we can reach out for an opinion. I always knew that I wanted to have SARK's opinion of the book as I think she is the warmest, most encouraging of all the creative gurus I've read. She was very nice about the book and wrote:
"This book makes me want to run wildly to my art and writing supplies, and create great stuff. I encourage you to experience The Creative License, and do the same!"
"The Creative License is a leaping burst of enthusiam, the best kind of permission, and thoroughly inspiring. I give it my highest recommendation"
Yay! Slap it on the cover.
I also love the work of Sabrina Ward Harrison, a fellow journalista, and she was nice enough to say:
"This is the book I have needed for so long, full of real true 'how it really feels' permission, ideas, experience, connection. Danny writes into what we all feel as creative beings. In this time, we need voices like Danny's more than ever. This is a great book to have waiting in my studio every morning."
How nice. Finally, we asked Craig Thompson for his opinion. Craig is the most amazing graphic memoirist. His book, Blankets, is an epic story of his adolescence which won every award around. His Carnets de Voyage is a wonderful record of his rambling through North Africa and he is currently at work on a huge fictional book that will revolutionize the graphic novel world. His lovely site, dootdoot garden, is really worth visiting. Craig read CL and was enthusiastic and suucinct:
"The Creative License is insightful and inspiring, and helped salvage me from my own creative block."
Once all the blurbs were in and placed, I futzed around with the design a couple more times and then fired it back to Hyperion.
Roll the presses!