Final Weekly Reflection :( !!!

Weekly Reflection #3

            Today was another long, tough, and tedious week of work for our children’s book. We wrapped up, and completed production of our story, and it feels awesome! It’s also very scary that three whole weeks flew by that quickly, and I am graduating in this upcoming week! Senior project puts such finality to my time at Proctor, but this was definitely the best way end my career at Proctor!

            This week was full of hard work and dedication! I started off the week by continuing edits and proofs of all the writing that was to be entered into the book. Many drafts were made, and then reworded, and than RETYPED, and then edited again! It was such a tedious process to have to edit, and keep editing so many different times for just this one book.  I was able to share my completed writings with Patty throughout the week as they were given the O.K by Deb for print. By allowing Patty to finally see the completed writing, this gave her a real sense of time so she could finish her illustrations. As Patty and I finally collaborated our work together in a mock-up layout of how we wanted our book to be printed, we were now able to start to scan our work into the Photoshop program at Deb’s cottage. This program is UNBELIEVABLE! This things that this program can do to manipulate, and superimpose pictures is crazy! This program literally save Patty’s and mines life, as three weeks to complete all illustrations for the book is a crazy task to even try to handle.

            As Patty and I scanned the pictures into the program, we were able to choose layouts and text placements for the book. Text placement is very important because this is what walks the reader through the characters page! (Tip from Marty Kelley!) With the help of Jack McKew, (without whom we would have NEVER have completed this project,) we completed the entire layout of our book, as well as front and back covers! This was a crazy thing to actually see! All of our worked for three entire weeks compiled into one twenty-page book was SO COOL to see!

            After completed the book layout on the Photoshop program, Patty and I then had to transfer this work of art to another computer at Deb’s house that had a program called “Quarks.” This program enables one to resize the page layouts from the Photoshop program to the wanted page dimensions for the actual book. Quarks also help to edit text, and put the book into a “printer layout.” A printer layout is one that puts the correct pages to correspond with one another so when opening the book, the same picture of on the pages desired, and not one half of one picture, and the other half of a completely different one! This was very difficult to do, as we could not see each page the way we wanted it printed, but we saw page halves the whole time! It was hard but with Deb’s awesome help we did it! We were then on our way to printing out our ENTIRE BOOK!!! This was crazy that throughout this entire process I kept picturing the day when Patty, Deb and I could print out our completed children’s book, and that day has come and gone! I cannot wait to show off our finished product to our committee and everyone at the Senior Project Show on Tuesday night! The book is even more amazing than I predicted, and I am so happy and lucky to have been given this amazing opportunity to work with Patty and Deb like this! THANK YOU BOTH SO MUCHO!