A Plan for Joy

I'm very excited to announce that a very big project I have been working on is completed and published!

A Plan for Joy in the Home: A Workbook on Organizing Your Day for Homeschooling Mothers is a wonderful workbook written by Laura Dominick that does exactly what the title says-- it gives awesome tips for homeschool parents. It's available for sale here.

A few months ago, Mrs. Dominick asked if I could do layout for a book that she wrote. I'd met her briefly this summer at the ReginaoCon and had a blast with her daughters.

Of course I said yes!

However, I had no idea how to go about doing graphic design for a book. I've worked on the online magazine Ink and Fairydust, but that is a little different. A book provides a whole new world of publication requirements. For instance, I had no idea how to do chapter pagination or how to add correct page numbering.

Mrs. Dominick was very gracious and understanding as I researched and learned about this brand-new world. Very understanding-- not only was I trying to do this from scratch and make it professional, but I was also plauged with major computer problems that put me behind schedule!

I was so excited to recieve the email with her draft. As I mentioned before, the workbook is really helpful (although I think that I don't really appreciate it fully-- I'm only a homeschool student, after all! And yet it seemed really wonderful to me.) Mrs. Dominick shares various plans for organizing the day, and provides plenty of real-life ideas that her family uses.

In addition to the graphic layout, I also did illustrations for each chapter. The image below is from the last chapter.

 She also asked me to do the front cover illustration. It was a challenging and invigorating artistic challenge, and I'm very happy that she was pleased with it! The drawing was loosly based off a photo of her family. I changed some details, added lots of warm coloring, and made the family more cartoony to fit in with the style of the illustrations.

(For those of you who, like me, appreciate these sorts of details, it was done with black pen and Prismacolor colored pencils on Bristol board. I burnished the prismacolors with a wax pencil finish... which made the second layer of pen lines hard to apply! The title was added with InDesign).

This has been a wonderful experience for me... I've learned so much, so many skills that will be useful in the future. And my work is being published... Yup, pretty excited about that. I'd love to take this chance to say THANK YOU to Mrs. Dominick for allowing me to be a part of this project!

A Plan for Joy in the Home is available both as a PDF download and as a printed book from HERE. Please visit the website!

Mrs. Dominick talks more about the workbook on her blog: HERE. And you can read her far-too-kind comments about working on it here.