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Showing posts with label Little Cloud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Little Cloud. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

An Interview with the Author of Little Cloud



The children's book Little Cloud is now available in print and as an e-book on Amazon.com  First published as an e-book in 2014, and a print edition on Blurb, it has now been made available as a print edition on Amazon.  Here's more information about the book, in the form of an interview:

Interviewer:  What is the story behind the story of Little Cloud?

Lucy Autrey Wilson:  I wrote and illustrated Little Cloud in 2014, at the peak of California’s driest period since record-keeping began, between late 2011 and 2014.  I was wishing for more rain so thought a story about a rain cloud might be nice.

Interviewer:  Is there a reason your other main character is a blue jay named Jack?

Lucy Autrey Wilson:  Since I made the cloud feminine, I thought it would be good to make the bird male.  I have twin grandsons who were four years old at the time, the age target of my story, and by making one of the characters male I hoped to appeal to them.  Neither of the twins is named Jack, but that name seemed to fit. I was also inspired by my backyard blue jays.

Interviewer:  Can you tell the reader a little bit about your illustration process.  It looks like your illustrations were drawn using vector software, is that correct?

Lucy Autrey Wilson:  Yes.  I wanted to make both a digital and a print book.  The requirements for an e-book meant getting the file size as small as possible.  I needed to create the art using vector software, instead of raster images.   A raster image is artwork created in a non digital medium, then scanned in to the computer becoming a digital file made up of pixels.  When these raster images are enlarged, the image quality diminishes significantly and the file sizes are much bigger.  Vector artwork, on the other hand, is composed of mathematical lines and curves.  Not only does vector art take up a lot less digital space, it can be scaled to any size without losing quality. 

Interviewer:  How did you come up with your book title?

Lucy Autrey Wilson:  The title Little Cloud just fit the story.  After I first published the e-book in 2014, I realized it was the same title as a book by Eric Carle, one of my favorite children’s book author/illustrators.  That was certainly not intentional.

Interviewer:  What source material did you use for your illustrations?

Lucy Autrey Wilson:  I am a photographer and am always looking for new ways to use the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken over the years.  At the time I wrote Little Cloud, I was also travelling up to Seattle a couple times a year to visit my daughter’s family, including the aforementioned twins.  So the photo reference in the beginning of Little Cloud was shot in Washington State.  Where Little Cloud travels south to, is Marin County, California, where I live.

The tall mountains in my story are based on the Olympic mountains, as seen from the top of Mount Walker, in Washington State.  The tallest of the Olympic mountains is Mount Olympus at 7,965 ft.



The body of water Little Cloud and Jack fly over is Puget Sound, as seen from Seattle.



Small Mountain is based on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County.  Although the biggest mountain around where I live, its peak is 2,572 ft.  much shorter than the Olympic mountains.

The various flower drawings are based on photographs taken at the Botanical Gardens in Fort Bragg, California in 2013.




Interviewer:  What do you hope your readers take away from the book?

Lucy Autrey Wilson:  First and foremost, I hope the reader is entertained.  Secondly, I hope the message of friendship, and the benefits of helping others, resonates.  And finally, I hope there is a little more awareness of the beautiful world we live in and a desire to help combat climate change to keep it that way.



Monday, October 6, 2014

Anatomy of an eBook Part II









Little Cloud drifts away from the Tall Mountains and meets a Blue Jay named Jack, in my Kindle Ebook story for kids called Little Cloud.   So where is Little Cloud going, and what are Little Cloud and Jack up to?  Again, we go to the top of Mount Walker, this time looking south at the panoramic views of Puget Sound and Green Hill, Turner Mountain and Buck Mountain.   On the hazy day in August, 2014, when I took the reference photos, it was difficult to make out much in the distance.  In referring to Wikipedia and the Free Dictionary some interesting facts emerge:  Puget Sound is an inlet of the Pacific Ocean and part of the Salish Sea.  In an unusual precedent, it was explored by Capt. George Vancouver who, rather than name the inlet after himself, named it for his aide Peter Puget.  The illustrations for Little Cloud and Jack surfing the breeze in the sky, had a more high tech birth, requiring a Photoshop filter from Alien Skin’s Eye Candy 7 software, called Motion Trail.  This plug-in was used to illustrate the meteorological phenomenon known as thermal lift, which is used by soaring birds (and Little Clouds) as an energy source.  Despite this energy aide, Jack got worn out playing in the sky with Little Cloud and expressed a wish to return to his home on Small Mountain.  More about this in Part III.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Anatomy of an eBook Part I





In my Kindle Kid's ebook Little Cloud, we are introduced to our main character when we see her floating up in the sky.  Where is she?  Turns out the reference for my artwork is based on a photo I shot at the top of Mount Walker, in Washington State, on a grueling hike taken in August, 2014.  Here’s a link to the Washington Trails Association’s webpage about Mount Walker:  http://www.wta.org/go-hiking/hikes/mount-walker.  The north summit view, from the top of Mount Walker, includes the third-highest peak in the Olympic Mountains range, Mount Constance (7,743’), and the other “Tall Mountains” are Warrior Peaks, Cloudy Peak, Buckhorn Mountain, Iron Mountain and Mount Townsend to the west and northwest. 

My reference photo and the art for e-book pages 6-8 are above.