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On this new website I introduce my latest picture book.

As part of the run-up to my new book, 'Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle', I thought I'd share this fun little step by step animation.

This image is built from layers in Photoshop. With the magic of digital technology, these layers can be transformed into an animation of sorts.

The original drawing forms the basic structure... while the layers add depth, color, type, background and shadows. It's sort of hypnotic to watch as the layers click together...

Photoshop can be useful in adjusting the elements... without some of the drawbacks of real paints.

The title of my new book is 'Cromwell Dixon's Sky-Cycle'. It's a fantastic true story about a boy named Cromwell Dixon, who was known in the newspapers a century ago as America's 'Boy Aeronaut'.

He had a dream to build his own flying airship in Columbus, Ohio in 1907... and this is a book about how his dream came true.

This is a real boy's book... with imagination, daring, adventure, danger and amazing inventions... all built by a boy in his own backyard.

That was always one of my favorite boyhood things to do... build amazing new contraptions out in the backyard.

Hi, everyone! Just thought I'd spread the news about my little blog tour for my new book, NO MUSH TODAY by Sally Derby, published by Lee and Low Books.


Check out the reviews, see the pics at:
my blog
Big A little a
Lori Calabrese


And check out the latest at Seven Impossible Things:
http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/?p=1472


I don't know if this will generate sales, but the publisher has been great about it, I had a good time, other folks did, too. I'd recommend it for anyone promoting books on a budget and with limited time. :)

Who started all this talk about book trailers, anyway? It was illustrator Layne Johnson, who has several such videos on YouTube. His Farmer George preview is sure to inspire viewers to read this beautiful book, written by Peggy Thomas.


Some years ago, a children’s radio station in Orlando made an audio version of one of my older books, The Dragon Halloween Party. There was bouncy music, professional voice overs, and high-pitched exclamations by the dragons such as “Ouch!” and “Oooooo!” It was delightful, but there was no chance of doing anything like that myself. Or maybe there is…



Several PBAA members have been inspired to make trailers in the last few days. Hopefully some of them will post their masterpieces, too. A few tips from my newbie experience:

On a Mac, iMovie works well to create a mini-movie. I had to download v.3.0.3 to get the “Ken Burns Effect,” where you can pan and zoom across still images. It can be a little temperamental, so save your work often. My system is so old (OS 10.2.8), I couldn’t use the newer versions—the latest version is iMovie 08.

You need iPhoto to create an “album” of the illustrations images which then can be brought into iMovie. They have to be in an album or iMovie can’t see them. I downsampled the illos first in Photoshop to make them about the size of a photo (4" X 6") because iMovie seemed to reject an image that was too large. It probably says in the Help what the maximum image size is, may have to read it sometime…

The voice-overs were recorded using my digital camera, which can be set to record in Audio mode while taking a photo. (My computer does not have a built-in microphone.) Each bit of sound was tweaked in Audacity, a free download. You can make the sound track faster, higher, lower, and do various other distortions. Max Headroom, anyone?

I didn’t use any music in my preview, but would like to try it in the future. My brother has Garage Band, and it should be easy to put together a simple bouncy tune to layer underneath.

One note: if you plan to embed the YouTube viewer, be sure to make a “custom” viewer. After playing your video, the standard one puts random videos from YouTube as little icons to click on and play, which I didn’t want. I think there’s a Blogger viewer, but didn’t take the time to figure that out.

It’s ton of fun, although it did take a fairly long time to make only one minute of video. Now that I have an idea of the process, the next one should go faster. Why not make a preview video of your book today?

Loreen

I know this is late..and weekly winners have been posted... but this is my first for Monday artday... and I figured I would submit it anyway.... This little gal is "all" curl.... and check out my personal blog for the 'other' version..