What it took to get this far...

I'm getting some questions about how long it took to put this book together, that's a really tough question to answer!

The very first drawing I ever did for it was probably when I was about thirteen years old. That drawing is not part of the final publication but it did lead to further development of ideas and after many iterations we have the current version of the witch. (A very early version of the witch appears on the page that begins "and before you know it...")

I have drawn and redrawn most of the pages in the book over the course of more than twenty years. There is simply no way I can say what it actually took to make this based on ALL that truly went into it.

Instead, as a basis for estimation, let's look at the time it took to complete the pages that were started in 2014, specifically the wolf. I made probably a dozen concept drawings before choosing a pose and style to use. I'll estimate about ten hours for the concept phase for this page (including a very unique tree). Coloring the image and creating the background actually took about twenty hours (yep, all that fur and all those stars and every point of light on that tree are drawn). It took approximately ten more hours to finalize it for the second edition (which is why I suggest you start with images that are a lot larger than you need if you ever attempt something like this).

I can create a full page illustration in about three days with a solid plan, I did not have a solid plan so I estimate this particular page took about 40 hours, including experimentation and a lot of time trying to get the right 'feel' for the image to get it ready for the second edition.

There are 13 full page illustrations (including the cover) plus 27 other pages, some of which took a day or two in and of themselves. Let's say it took about a week to do all of the formatting and to set up the pages that are primarily text, and about one more week to get the crafts section together. Conservatively, that's 15 weeks. I said earlier the wolf took about forty hours total to get it ready for the second edition. Knowing that the wolf was one of the most straightforward pages in the project I'm going to add @50% to the time for the other 11 pages and the cover. This should help account for time spent learning how to get the book ready for publication. Most of the additional time was spent reworking images for print, improving the illustrations, and a considerable amount of time spent reformatting from the original 9x6 to the current 8.5x8.5 format. My math may be a little inaccurate here as I am @12 hours into today's work, and since my days are usually at least that long I'm going to go easy on myself and just use the number I think is right.

I started in earnest around mid December 2014. The book was first published in print the first week of April, 2015. A span of  about 14-15 weeks. I have to include some time for all of the work that went in to it before I started driving toward publication.

My best estimate? It took about 21 'normal' work weeks from concept to published second edition, tallying approximately 840 hours. Knowing what I now know about the publication process and the significant difference between preparing for print versus preparing for digital distribution, I think I could create something similar in about 12-15 weeks. I hope you'll agree that it was time well spent!