The Flowers That Bloom in May PDF (10.5 MB)
During the month of May I challenged myself to draw every day. I chose as my theme the flowers in our backyard. I’ve been spending the last month and a half writing a journal about the project, which contains a gallery of all my sketches and field notes about my methods, materials, thoughts, and discoveries.
“The Flowers That Bloom in May” – PDF (68 pages, 10.5 MB)
I thought it would be better to put everything into a single document instead of writing 30 individual blog posts. I used Swift Publisher 3, which is a desktop publishing program for the Mac, to develop the PDF. This was the first time I’ve used a desktop publishing program. There was a lot to learn and many things had to be decided up front such as the size of the book, the size of the margins, and the design of the master pages. It took several days to reach a final design.
I wrote my initial ideas and notes using the Evernote app on my iPad. Then, on my iMac, I copied and pasted text from Evernote into Swift Publisher 3. Most of the text in the Gallery section came from my descriptions of each sketch, which I posted each day in my Flickr.com Photostream. I used Safari on the iMac to copy the description and paste it into Swift Publisher 3. All further writing and editing were done directly in Swift Publisher 3.
I saved the document as a PDF from Swift Publisher 3 and opened it in Preview to proof read it. I used the annotation feature in Preview to mark and note corrections. After I was done editing, I reduced the file size of the PDF (from 58 Mb down to 10 Mb) by resampling and compressing the images in the file with ColorSync Utility. I created links to URLs and to pages within the document using Adobe Acrobat Professional.
My friend Lucy MacDonald encouraged and helped me through the final editing . Many thanks Lucy.
Jim
