{"id":9390,"date":"2018-02-08T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-08T08:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=9390"},"modified":"2018-02-03T14:00:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-03T22:00:07","slug":"my-own-illustrator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=9390","title":{"rendered":"My Own Illustrator"},"content":{"rendered":"

I showed a picture my generic Android phone to a colleague. He remarked how nice it looked and asked where I got it. “I made it,” I replied. He was impressed. That got me thinking about how I do graphics and illustrations for my books.
\n
\nThe generic phone illustration is shown in Figure 1. It’s based on an early Nexus phone, but I did the artwork myself.<\/p>\n

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Figure 1. My “generic Android phone” illustration.<\/p><\/div>\n

I use Adobe Illustrator for my books’ illustrations. Sometimes I also use Photoshop to customize a picture, but Illustrator has been my go-to program for over 25 years.<\/p>\n

Back in the early days, if you wanted an illustration in a computer book you had two options. First, you could take a screenshot. If you wanted the screenshot illustrated with callouts (arrows and descriptions), you printed it out and wrote the down what you wanted. Or second, you could do a crude illustration and the publisher would hire an artist to make it look good.<\/p>\n

For years, that’s how I illustrated my books: I’d take a screenshot and then scribble what I wanted. If I wanted something fancy, I’d try to cobble it together and the publisher would make it look pretty.<\/p>\n

About 20 years ago, however, publishers got cheap. They wanted me to submit completed artwork. I asked to get paid for it, since I was saving them time and money by doing the illustrations myself, but the publisher gave me an option: Submit your own artwork or a book doesn’t have any artwork. Because I knew the value of the artwork, I opted to continue doing my own — and receiving no compensation for my efforts.<\/p>\n

As time passed, eventually I got better at using Adobe Illustrator. I figured out some tricks. I watched some training videos. I was doing pretty well based on what I saw, though I was still cobbling things together in an awkward way where the program offered new and better shortcuts. I learned those techniques and continued to upgrade the quality of the illustrations in my books, all without receiving anything for my efforts from the publisher, not even a thank-you.<\/p>\n

The lack of recognition is why my friend’s comment struck near to my core: The illustrations were pretty good, yet taken for granted.<\/p>\n

Here’s a gallery of images I use currently or have used in the past:<\/p>\n

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PC setup.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Assorted laptops.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Speaker arrangement and definitions.<\/p><\/div>\n

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A generic inkjet printer.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Keyboard illustration.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a reason why my publisher doesn’t pay for the pretty pictures in my books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9390"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9390\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9421,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9390\/revisions\/9421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}