Here's the first two pages from Aurora Borealice, book 2 - I'll be posting something every Friday till the book is done! Please feel free to ask any questions regarding artwork or content. I'm going to show the artwork in progress, and not necessarily in any order. The dialogue (word balloons) still needs some work, so they'll be added when I finish all the images. So for now, I'm going to add captions like I did for my first book.  

This book starts off where the first one ended, new year's day 1981. Ken and I were both 26, living in the Beaches area in Toronto. Art school was now behind us, but the rest of my education was still ahead of me...

Aurora Borealice is a series of four autobiographic novels that span 40 years of my life, and I've been working away on Book 2. For those of you who have read the first book and are wondering what happened next - well, here I go... These books are about my ongoing struggle with literacy while  juggling kids, Ken, career, and getting an education, all the while finding out that life itself is the real education. I hope my story resonates with anyone who takes the time to have a look. 
I'm hoping to be finished in the spring 2012, and I'll be posting both finished and unfinished pages over the course of the next few months so you can see the work in progress. The page above is the  first pencil drawing, soon to be  finished with pen and tonal washes.  The word balloons won't be added for a while. I've written the first draft of the whole book and layed out the pages in thumbnail sketches, now I'm in the long process of copying them onto lined off 11x17 comic pages for all to see - gulp!

And now for something completely different...

This is Ken having fun at my expense! 

Today is Remembrance Day and I think of how my dad missed both wars because he was too young to serve in WWI and too old for WWII. But he did his part, in a way, by working in the munitions factory turning scrap metal into tanks.

 Here are some photos I used as reference for my book. This was the view of the scrap yard from our living room window, taken by my sister Barb sometime in the early 70's with my dad and sister Beryl in the foreground. That's me in the background with my brother Ed and our dog!

Here's a wider angle view of the front yard - directly behind the big building was an ice rink. It took us hours to clear the snow, but it was worth it to have our very own little Maple Leaf gardens!

The scrap piled higher and higher, and every few years my dad would hire a crane to stack the cars on a flatbed truck to be hauled away to Hamilton and recycled. This was my playground growing up!!! 

This is the only good picture I have of my dads boom-truck, unfortunately you can't see the back part. In my book I did show the whole thing.

Sorry for not posting in a while - in future I'll try and post something weekly. Today I'd like to show samples of the stages I went through to make my book, starting with thumbnail sketches of the page layouts. For anyone who is not familiar with the term - thumbnail sketches are very small sketches, I should have put my thumb on the sketch to show the size but anyway, you get the picture. 

  
From these sketches I'd work up the drawing into the actual-size pages of the book. Then transfer that drawing onto a an 11x17 inch sheet good quality paper, then pencil the final drawing, scan it and colour it digitaly using Photoshop. Done! 

Here's the back cover of my book, with one of my dads favorite ditties he loved to recite on his birthdays. Next week I'm going to show you the stages I went through to make this book. 

I hope whoever is looking at my blog has enjoyed this story as much as I enjoyed writing and illustrating it. When I started this book, I wasn't sure if my dad would live to see it, and I was so happy to give him a copy on his 100th birthday, five years ago this weekend. He loved it, and passed away a few months after that - so, that's that!