Happy Hanukkah!
I hope you’re not getting sick of all these posts about illustrations, because I’ve got a whole week’s worth to crow about, and not a whole lot else. Nextbook.org is publishing a story about Hanukkah on each day of the holiday, and we decided to (a) get each one of them illustrated, and (b) have an image of a menorah (or, more specifically, a Hanukiah, as I learned yesterday—thank god for Wikipedia) on the home page, which will change each day as a new story is posted.
So I’ve spent the last few weeks scrambling to hire artists—a task complicated by the fact that I didn’t have electronic files for most of the stories and had to scan them using lousy OCR software when I became desperate, and by my spending last week in Ireland. Then yesterday afternoon I sat down with pen and paper myself, to come up with a menorah that would suit our needs. The above beauty is what I (rather laboriously) came up with. The process went something like sketch, erase, sketch, erase, sketch, scan, drastically reshape in Photoshop, print, trace, scan, pathify in Illustrator, divide into layers, color. After I’d done all this, I realized that I’d need to move each candle onto another layer, so that I could “light” a new one each day. Oy. It would have been helpful to have thought of this sooner; I’m very clumsy at cutting things up in Illustrator.
On the bright side, I’m really glad I didn’t try to hire someone else to draw this for us. I don’t see how that could have worked, as I had to change it about a million times in the last half hour before today’s story went live.
The final structure (I wouldn’t really call this a drawing) doesn’t quite suit our needs, as there’s no room to stow the heds and deks of the previous days’ stories each time a new one is published. So tomorrow I’ll have to create an inside page that lists all the stories in detail (with a slightly different version of the menorah—requiring another stack of layers). Visitors will be able to click on a thumbnail to go directly to a particular story, but if they click anywhere else on the banner, they’ll go to the index of all the stories published so far.
Anyway, on to the real illustration: today’s story is by Nextbook.org’s esteemed editor, Joanna Smith Rakoff, and because it’s an unusually long piece for us, I got to commission two illustrations for it from Kirsten Harper. You can see them both in Joanna’s story, which I recommend reading, as well as looking at: Dolls of the World.