Draw the Natural Wonders of Europe is nearing completion. While that is happening we have been hard at work on Draw the Natural Wonders of The USA, the second book in the new series and all part of the Draw the World series.
Not only will your students be drawing geographical points of interest, they’ll also become familiar with many of the trails the explorers, pioneers and gold-seekers used. In addition they’ll learn about Native American territories and will also draw a dozen or so animals, trees, plants and water life found in the USA.
If this all sounds fun, it is. Like the Draw the World series, these books walk students through with easy step-by-step instructions. Humor will be sprinkled throughout along with lots of geographical facts to increase your student’s curiosity and amazement about the world around us.
The Process
To create a book like this there are number of steps:
- Determine what natural wonders to use
This can be somewhat difficult once the obvious ones are chosen (The Grand Canyon, for example), but what about San Diego Bay or Crater Lake or Thor’s Well? Are these important enough to include? - Determine the order and number of steps
Once the wonders have been chosen, then one must decide what order to present them in and how many to put on each page. - Create the pages
From the master Photoshop file, we create the necessary steps turning on instruction layers then turning them off for the next layer of instructions. If you get 20 pages down the line and realize you forgot to turn off an instruction layer….you have to go all the way back to that point and start over. - Construct the book
We are now using InDesign to create our books. The pages have to be added, content written, file formatted, etc. - Create the Cover
- Upload the Book and buy a proof.
Keep doing this until it’s right - Make it live!!
This is, of course, is very interesting for you, dear reader, but keep in mind it is wildly amusing for search engines, an entity we’re always thinking about here at ARTK12.
Samples
I won’t call these “Sample Pages” because they are not. They are essentially what your students will end up with when they are done, though theirs will be four sheets of paper and all drawn by them. In a future post, I will display my USA map after going through the steps. You won’t want to miss that!
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