How I made the bookmarks

Do you love how I’m saying “I” made the bookmarks when Nicole did all the work? Well, I paid for the tacos, anyway. And the Alex Ross artbook she called reference and I called a bribe. That’s almost like work, isn’t it?

Step 1: Take reference photos.

The lovely Carolyn Kabelitz modeled for Rae, in a somewhat ad-hoc version of Rae’s costume. My parents’ backyard provided the backdrop. We took a bunch of photos and cherry-picked the best ones.

Trevor was a more difficult task, mostly because I don’t know any guys with the right build and facial structure to double for him. I knew plenty in high school, of course, which is why he looks and acts the way he does, but most of them did eventually get that last growth spurt and are now much taller than I am. So I dug up a photo of a boy playing what looks like flag football and told Nicole to use her imagination. There were extra tacos involved.

Step 2: Lay out the bookmark design

This is the point where Nicole took over. She flopped the image of Carolyn so that she now appeared to be standing with her left hip toward the camera—you’ll see why in a minute—and turned both photos black-and-white. Then she fiddled with layouts until she arrived with something she liked in the right proportions to fit on the bookmarks, which we knew would be 2x6”.

Step 3: Pencil.

Next Nicole printed out the photos at four times their final size (that’s 4x12”, for those keeping score) and laboriously copied the poses. She added Rae’s logo brooch at her hip (the reason she flopped the photo in Step 2) and lengthened her tunic. She also wants it known that she is now going to draw Rae in Chuck Taylors at every opportunity, because Carolyn made them look so superheroic.

The Trevor image was harder, of course, because she had to take an image of a boy running in a loose T-shirt and shorts and translate it into an image of a boy running in long pants and a jacket, and add his signature mask and goggles. It didn’t come out too badly, though. Nicole also changed the position of the boy’s right arm, because “every time I drew it like it was in the photo, it looked weird.”

Step 4: Watercolor

After Nicole scanned in the sketches to back them up in case something went wrong, she began applying watercolor paint to the images—first the black areas, then the lighter shading. We knew we’d be tinting the Rae image red and the Trevor image blue, so the whole process was very much about values of light and dark—making the shadows stand out sharply, capturing the different grays that would represent the hues of their costumes. The final step was to brush gray paint lightly around the figures to create a textured background and a sense of light. Nicole asks me to inform you that she decided to make the area behind Rae’s shoulder darker because she has such ominous forces around her all the time, and she gathered some shadows near Trevor’s front foot because John Lawrence is always showing up overhead and glowing, which would naturally make the sky around Trevor very light.

Step 5: Production

Once the black-and-white paintings were dry, I stepped in again and scanned them into my laptop. There I used PhotoFiltre to remove the penciled boundary lines marking the edges of the bookmarks (the printer asked me to leave 1/8” clear all the way around the design in case of printing issues) and add the text to each image—the quote, plus the information about the book and the blog address. Finally I used the Colorize option to tint Rae’s bookmark red, then turned up the saturation and contrast to get a really vivid hue. I did the same thing to tint Trevor’s bookmark image blue. Then I emailed the two .jpgs to the wonderful Richard Fieger, printer extraordinaire, and let him do his magic.

The result—my best bookmarks ever, which is good because with this much work for a 2x6” piece of cardstock, I don’t want to have to redesign them anytime soon. Although I’m sure I’ll end up tinkering with the proportions just a bit on the next batch … I really need industrial-strength therapy.

Real-life heroes

I spent the weekend helping Nicole Le with her prep work for the upcoming trailer project. (Note for the newbies: Nicole is a friend from high school who volunteers her artwork to help make Masks look good because I can’t just post the whole book online. I pay her in fast food, usually tacos or Flame Broiler bowls, and the negotiations are … interesting.) She’s gotten heavily into painting of late, and picked up a few ideas from an Alex Ross artbook she found in the local library. Ross does a lot of superhero paintings and works heavily from photographs, and because a) Nicole’s camera doesn’t work and b) I have, from time to time, worked as a news photographer and/or videographer, she asked me to help her out with the technical side.

We didn’t have a live model for Trevor—basically, we didn’t know any guys of the right build and facial cast who were (and this is critical) short enough to pass for Trevor—so there was some pulling out of photos from old yearbooks and the like. But for Rae, we had a real live human being—Carolyn Kabelitz, younger sister of Amber Peters, one of my best friends and (in my humble opinion) the finest living American coloratura.

We didn’t have an actual Peregrine costume lying around for Carolyn (how crazy so you think I am?), so we improvised with an old hooded tunic/shirt I made a few years ago when I was testing how a Peregrine-style tunic would hold up in hot weather. (So, that crazy … and for the record, I walked around in it all day at a theme park in July, and became neither overheated nor sunburned—take that, spandex monkeys!) Carolyn’s slimmer than I am, so we took it in at the sides, hiked the sleeves a bit, and adjusted the hood so she looked more like a superhero and less like a Nazgul. And then we took some pictures.

It was … odd.

I’ve known Carolyn for more than a decade, since she was tagging along after her big sister and sitting in on our anime DVD-a-thons. I’ve lived with Rae in my head for about as long, but hadn’t really put the two of them together until my artists began asking me for visual reference on Rae. My early drafts of the book didn’t describe her until the third chapter or so (an oversight that has now been corrected, although Rae’s view of herself and what Trevor sees when he looks at her later are slightly, and significantly, different). I had never considered her physical appearance particularly important, perhaps because she doesn’t think it’s important, and goes out of her way to disguise it. Rae, in my head, was a voice. But artists need a face. So I grabbed the nearest brunette of the right build and got to work.

At first, I was just looking through my viewfinder at Carolyn and trying to get her to strike whatever poses Nicole had sketched out in her thumbnail roughs. I focused on lighting and position, getting the folds in the cloth to stand out clearly so Nicole could see them when she used the photos as reference later. Carolyn giggled and mugged between takes—she is naturally cheerful, much more so than Rae, and takes a staggering amount of joy in life. I yelled out random words to try to get her to make whatever face Nicole said she needed, and generally tried to make the real person line up with the imaginary one.

But then—briefly at first, then more and more regularly—I began seeing flashes of somebody else when I lined up my shots. Something in Carolyn’s eyes as she glanced up at the camera, the curve of her mouth as she looked down to adjust her costume, the ruffle of her hair in the breeze. For heartbeats at a time, I could almost see Rae standing there. I could see little bits of my character coming through. Carolyn’s been a Masks reader for years, and while she hasn’t read the current draft, she has a pretty good sense of what Rae’s like. Yet I’m fairly certain she wasn’t trying to act between shots. She was just finding the little bits of Rae that were already in her … bits that probably went into the character when I had to design an indomitable teenage girl who enjoyed yanking supervillains’ chains.

Makes me wonder how many people I know went into the people I made …