Creating an illustrated book

Illustrated books are a fascinating hybrid art form, suitable for all ages and topics.

This is a call to all (budding, hidden, dreaming) artists willing to take on the long-term project of crafting a full illustrated book, from cover to cover -- whether you can already draw & paint or not (see below).

What will we do?
This will be a first meeting to discuss techniques, tools, and to have a first pass at our ideas for a possible illustrated book. Each person can make their own full book, or collaborations may arise spontaneously during this or follow-up meetings.

Do I need to be good at drawing & painting?
No. We will discuss digital techniques for those of us who are not great at drawing.

What do I need to bring?
Please bring something to draw: Any paper (even a normal line notebook), would be fine; and any pen, marker or pencil.
Again, it's fine if you can't draw well. We'll just start diagramming the book, and stick figures or even just text will do perfectly fine.

Should I do something beforehand?
No. But you can start thinking of topics for your book. Also, if you want to start getting an idea of some of the tools we can use, do bring your laptop and install the following software beforehand:
-Krita (https://krita.org): A free and open-source drawing software that combines vectors and bitmaps, with hundreds of brushes. You can of course instead use any combination of Procreate, Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, Inkscape, or any other software that you prefer, or you can choose to work completely analogously all the way.
-DM's Photo-Paradies software (https://fotoparadies.de): We can use this to incrementally produce and visualise our work, and finally to print our completed book semi-professionally at DM. You can print your book anywhere else you like, of course, or you can keep it digital.

Cost
None! However, Meetup charges around 200€ yearly to keep this group running (😖), so any contributions towards those costs would be much appreciated 🙏🏽
Printing your book at the end should cost you around 40€ if you do it at DM.

What if I can't make it this time?
No worries. This will be a long process. Just send the organiser a private note so that we know you're interested in future meetings.

Warning
Overall, creating a full book will be a long process, taking perhaps a year or at least several months. So, here, we will just have an initial conversation on what the process can look like, and we'll get started on that process.

[cover image credit: Maurice Sendak's 1963 masterpiece "Where the Wild Things Are"]