Creating a Book about Painting Flowers in Acrylics

I was merrily pursuing my normal life painting and running our art gallery when one day I found a startling email in my inbox. Quarto in London was inquiring if I wanted to do a book on painting flowers in acrylics.

I was dumbfounded. I did a little quick research and discovered Quarto is highly respected in the creation of how to books. They do not publish under their own name but partner with other publishers and co-publish the books with them.

I expressed interest in learning more about their project. The first thing they wanted me to do was make a synopsis and provide the material for three spreads to take to the London Book Fair.

They offered to pay a flat fee for the work I would do with no royalties. The book was intended to be a companion volume to a work on watercolor they already had published.

Intrigued, I agreed to do the project.

I quickly discovered Quarto editors are simply wonderful from my point of view. They definitely know exactly what they are doing and are skilled at communicating what they need.

Our biggest dilemma usually turned out to be my remote location in Montana. Mail was slow. Their courier methods were often thwarted by the fact some of those couriers did not provide service to Montana. The phone worked well and so did email.

Once I learned how to work with their ftp server, we bypassed mail and courier services as much as possible. I simply uploaded the images and text directly to their server from my computer. Frankly, I think the book would have been nearly impossible without doing that.

When I saw the first sample page spreads, I was delighted. Their art department skillfully put together some attractive layouts and I got even more excited about the project. They sent the layouts to India for samples to be printed for the book fair.

As hoped, Quarto lined up a co-publisher at the London Book Fair. They were ready to proceed with the entire book.

We had to iron out a few details. One was the copyright status of my work, since I might want to include the works in a fine art book later. That would be a non-conflicting use, but did not fit their boiler plate contract. We resolved those issues over time.

The next problem was that the watercolor book was more simplistic than the acrylic flower painting book. We were trying to shoehorn much more information into the compact watercolor layout.

The editor showed me how ruthlessly they can cut text to make it fit. I think editors love cutting text more than anything else in life.

I suggested the space saving idea of including a diagram of the flower with parts labeled to reduce the need for description in the text describing the painting process. They liked that idea, so I had one more task for each flower painting in the book.

Initially we were going to do fifty flowers, but we ended up with slightly fewer. But even with fewer, that many historical descriptions of the flower with the Latin name, palette list, palette color swatches, diagram, and a description of the painting process was a lot of work.

That has not yet mentioned that each painting had a special detail in it that illustrated a particular technique or approach in painting.

This also did not address the other sections of the book dealing with materials, creating luminosity, troubleshooting, etc. I soon found myself utterly buried in work.

My life became a non-stop production of paintings in all my waking hours. Many of the how to books feature quick and easy paintings, but my work is more complex than that. I ate, slept, and painted every day, day after day, week after week.

My husband began to joke with me when I finished a painting. "Just throw it on the pile and keep going" he would say.

One advantage to doing a book with so many different flowers required is I had the opportunity to paint all sorts of flowers I had wanted to do but had not taken the time to do so previously.

Fortunately Quarto gave me a substantial materials budget and I ordered in plenty of paints to use.