A Sharp-Schu trifecta is the perfect way to kick off the week. We're celebrating Lizi Boyd's INSIDE OUTSIDE. Your first stop is Colby Sharp's blog.
Mr. Schu: I love everything about INSIDE OUTSIDE: the texture of
the paper, the inventive die-cuts, the hidden mice, the cat, the boy, and the
dogs. I spot new details with each reading.
Please share the process of making INSIDE OUTSIDE. I’m especially
interested in how Chronicle Books manufactured the book. I imagine there are
unique challenges (all fun) when printing a book that has die-cut holes.
Lizi Boyd: Thank you Mr. Schu. I like it too. INSIDE OUTSIDE is a book that
feels like it has been waiting inside me for years. I think it was the paper
that finally found the book. A printer friend had given me big sheets of kraft paper.
I made some large drawings and liked the texture, how the black and white
popped and its simplicity. I folded the scraps, made cut out windows and did
five or six little drawings.
Then I tucked them alongside my paint box. They sat there for a
month or more. My studio sits up on a hill with long views to the mountains. The
sketches mimic the inside and outside of my work space. It was winter when I
did the sketches and as the snow began to melt everything outside became brown
with patches of white. I went back to the kraft paper, cut pages with windows,
made a mock up book and began to paint.
The first book that was submitted was just black and white.
There was interest, suggestions and comments. Then came two more mock ups of
the book, one with a bit of color and the third one with its seasonal arc of
colors. I needed to make the book three times, 120 paintings, so I could ‘see’
if it worked. I wasn’t sure it needed color and I didn’t want to lose anything
along the way. The book changed only in that more detail, narrative and
characters appeared.
Chronicle Books believes in wonderfully constructed books and
they’re brilliant about how to produce them. There was a bit of back and forth with
production and the printer before I could begin the finishes. We needed to see
how different papers and colors would reproduce and how the die cuts would work
and be placed. Once the production details were settled I began to paint. The
final painting didn’t have die cuts so I had to make templates to see where
they would fall. It took all of me to imagine these details and then I’d pop up
in bed, worried I’d made a mistake and go and check. The art director at
Chronicle, Sara Gillingham, is very relaxed and knows how to make changes on
her computer. Doing my work with paint and brushes, mistakes are lurking
terrors for me.
Steve Kim, Production Manager: We had to adjust positioning so that things
lined up properly. Viewing the galleys PDFs we had to make sure the simulated
under lying pages actually matched the position of that under lying spread.
Then
the die cuts on each page need to align to the under lying page both when the
page is open to the right side of the gutter, and also when it's turned so that
it's on the left side.
When
binding, it's difficult to precisely align the die cuts, since there's a slight
variance from copy to copy. Also, when the signatures are folded, the inner
pages of the signatures are positioned very slightly farther away from the
spine than the outer pages, so won't exactly match a simulation using flat
spreads. This is called binders creep.
Those early mockups were
handbound, and I think the die cuts were also hand cut. So it's difficult to
make accurate adjustments from those.
There was a long search for a toothy, textured paper, but we
weren't able to find one that was affordable. We considered brown kraft paper
early on, but that would have been very expensive, and would have dulled the
colors.
The bright colors were hard to match in cmyk, but I picked out
the closest equivalents from the pantone process swatch books, and that helped
a lot.
Mr. Schu: What do you enjoy doing INSIDE?
Lizi Boyd: When I’m not in my studio which is nearly every day I like
playing music, making puppets, sewing, gathering up friends and cooking dinners.
I like taking tea breaks at home or scooting down to town to meet someone. And
I love reading in bed. I have tall, tippy stacks of books lined up beside my
bed so I have plenty of choices.
Mr. Schu: What do you enjoy doing OUTSIDE?
Lizi Boyd: I live in Vermont and it's all about seasons. I love being outside
all year: in the winter we snowshoe in the fields and cross country ski on the
wooded trails. In the spring and fall we hike and ride bikes. In the summer I
kayak and swim.I love to walk in the woods, watch all living things, gaze at
clouds and stars. Yesterday I took a drawing board to the farm up the road, sat
in the sun, and drew the little lambs with their pointy, black horns.
Mr. Schu: How did Olive and Zuli assist you in the making of INSIDE OUTSIDE?
Lizi Boyd: Every day I take a long morning walk with the Olive and Zuli. The
smells of the spring have them distracted these days. They run off into the
fields, poke around the stonewalls, chase out the squirrels and almost always
come when I call. I see things on our walks I wouldn’t see without them. And
then when we're home again they nap in the sun on the studio floor and keep me
company. While I work and sometimes talk to myself, they look at me and
understand what I'm saying.
Mr. Schu: If you invited us inside your studio, what would we see?
Lizi Boyd: My studio looks like the inside of a book. There are bits and
pieces of stories everywhere. There are shelves of materials, piles of books, drawings
in stacks, work on the walls. My drawing tables have tubes of paints, pencils, water
jars and at least a hundred brushes lined up against the edges of the tables.
It is messy but oddly tidy, noisy, lively, quiet and full.
Mr. Schu: I’m a huge fan of wordless books. They have a special section in
my school library. What inspired you to create INSIDE OUTSIDE as a wordless book?
Lizi Boyd: INSIDE OUTSIDE came about all on its own; silently, simply,
following in and out through the seasons. Making the book was as if I'd found
the child who just loves to sit and draw. And I just went off with her to find
out where she was going. I didn’t think of it as a wordless book until it was
finished. And then I thought of it as a book that could belong to the eyes and
imagination of any child that held it.
Please complete these sentence starters:
Picture books are places to go, see, be. They are dreamy and
quiet, noisy and delighting. They can take you far away or pull you very close.
Reading is full of sounds, sights, sensations, imaginations and
wondrous discoveries.
Mr. Schu, you should have asked me what I liked about libraries
when I was a child.
We lived in a small Vermont town and we didn’t have a school
library so we walked to the town’s library, a great marble building with shiny
stone floors and heavy wooden doors.I loved the seriousness of the libraries,
the commanding ‘shh’of the librarians and the sneaky desires created from all that silence. I liked the stacks, the loud clicking
light switches. I liked finding books no one had opened in years, their musty
smells, embossed covers, the delicate tracing paper flaps protecting the illustrations.
I loved getting a special pass to take out more books than my card allowed.
Everything about libraries made me feel like an adult and it still makes me feel
that way.
I am giving away one copy of INSIDE OUTSIDE.
Rules for the Giveaway
1. It will run from 4/14 to 11:59 P.M. on 4/16.
2. You must be at least 13.
3. Please pay it forward.
Lizi Boyd is today's Nerdy Book Club blogger.
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