For those of you who are subscribers, be forewarned that you are getting a sneak peek of an upcoming Idiots’Book. We’re actually not sure which volume it is going to be yet – contingency is resting on when Tarzan arrives and whether I can get another book illustrated before then. I am keeping my fingers crossed.
We thought it would be prudent to have some projects in the hopper in case Tarzan arrives early, like his/her inconsiderate older sister. One of the projects is a poster based on our “Six Degrees of Francis Bacon” mural. This mural spans four walls, the ceiling and two sliding doors in Washington College’s Rose O’Neill Literary House. There are 50 (or 51?) portraits of well-known writers that are connected to one another with clever little phrases – i.e. Charles Dickens “accidentally sang a Christmas carol to” Philip Roth; Stephen King “burns $100 bills and laugh gleefully with” J.K. Rowling; and one of my personal favorites: Edith Wharton “grudgingly changed her main character’s name to Ethan Frome after finding out that the name Moby Dick had already been taken by” Melville. When I first decided to undertake the project last spring, I sent Matthew and Alden off to Kansas for ten days, thinking that I would finish the mural in 3 days and make serious progress on the new website with the remaining week.
Ah, the naiveté of youth! After working for 18-hour days with a small army of tireless and enthusiastic students, the mural was barely finished in time for its unveiling. You can find the excruciatingly detailed misery of the whole process on thebarnstorming if you do a search for “mural“. Here’s one entry that gives you a peek into the madness, for starters.
Anyway, the challenge to convert this into something subcribers could enjoy (but which also does not require me to visit 200+ homes with paintbrushes in hand) seemed like it would be pretty easy. We found a printer that could print up a fairly large poster (24″x36″) and figured we could just cram everything onto that. And so it began. Well, let me tell you: the naiveté of youth! This darn thing is so complicated that I was fairly cross-eyed before we even got the first 10 portraits down. Hopefully constant cross-eyes doesn’t adversely affect pregnancies (though I bet there’s very little research on it to prove otherwise) – we’ll just have to wait and see. Reducing everything from room-sized to poster-sized turned it into veritable hornets’ nest of chutes and ladders. And changing one thing here could affect another thing there, which in turn would affect another thing there, and so on and so on. We examined and pored over and checked and double-checked, but errors abounded. I would think that we had everything all set and print the sucker out full-size. This meant printing it out on 16 different sheets of paper, which I would then trim and tape together:
(all in my pajamas, of course). Then we’d go over it with a fine-toothed comb and find 10 more mistakes, and I’d have to print the whole damn thing out again. We have about thirty copies of this stupid thing which Matthew won’t let me destroy. And a few copies that I did destroy before he could stop me.
At any rate, it has finally been officially sent off to the printers and we are looking forward to seeing the final proof (with no mistakes, we hope!) sometime this week. If you never hear about this project again, it is because I have torn everything up and deleted all the files in order to preserve my sanity.
In the meantime, I worry that the cross-eyes might be contagious.
