Today or tomorrow I will be creating a limited edition full-color book of paintings and poems created by participants of a workshop I taught recently for the Sedona Arts Center, "The Heart of Landscape Art."
That sounds both Herculean and costly, doesn't it? But for a Mac user, it's neither.
If you are an artist or art teacher with a Mac, you should know about a great feature of I-Photo that allows you to create such a small book with a very fast turn-around (about a week) at about $1 a page for 8.5 x 11. (Smaller sizes are available also). This is also a great way for artists to show off their best works and perhaps offer it as a bonus to their collectors.
Our focus in the workshop was to delve into the soul of nature and express it with both the written word and a plein air sketch or pastel. The book will include student's artwork, poems and photos, as well as some ideas that I will share about the process of writing poetry with outdoor painting.( If you are interested in a copy, let me know!)
If you've never created a Mac Book, here's how, in a nutshell (an easy I-Photo tutorial will guide you further):
1. Assemble your digital images into an album in I-Photo.
2. Select them all (command-A).
3. Click on "Book" at the bottom of the window.
4. Select a style (I like "contemporary" -- most are more oriented toward family snapshots, etc.)
5. You can either "autoflow" them into a default layout, and then rearrange them as you like, or manually drag them from the line of images it creates into the page layout templates.
6. Under "page design" at the bottom, you can select how many pictures to use on each page or you can select "introduction" to create a template for text on a given page. Play with it: it's easy.
7. Using the zoom bar, lower right, enlarge your page layouts so you can easily enter text and captions as needed. You can also easily drag images from one position to another, as you will see. Likewise, you can drag page layouts around in various sequences.
8. When you are done, simply click on "Buy book" and complete the credit card and shipping info.
Presto! In a week to ten days you will have your books in hand!
The main limitation I've found with this program is that the templates are fixed in some ways. You can't move the position of the text block, for example, and it's not very compatible with paintings that are square (crops them into a rectangle of standard proportions). But it makes up for that deficit by being beautifully designed in the first place and SO, so easy.
Also, note that if your images are too low-resolution, you may have to reduce their size. I-Photo's book program will warn you about this. That said, have found incredible quality on a full-page picture of an 8x10 painting that I shot with my hand-held point-and-shoot 2 meg. Canon camera. Mostly, though, in
my own book of poems and paintings, I used high-quality professional photos.
But the real beauty of it is that it doesn't require great computer skills to learn. It's quite intuitive, as Macs are meant to be, and you and others will love the result.
I'm looking forward to having it ready for the class in time for them to give copies out at Christmas.
And the class was such a success, SAC will offer it
again.
I would love to share this experience with you. It's appropriate for all levels of artists, beginning to advanced.
Click
here for a downloadable PDf flyer of the workshop.
Here is Carol Oveross, artist and yoga instructor, sketching in pastels at Red Rock Crossing after participants had written a piece about the feelings and meanings invoked by the landscape:
