How Samantha and the Box Turtle was created.

Lots of work goes into writing and publishing a book. Here are a few of the steps it took to get from idea to published book...

Writing	Illustrating
Rough Draft Written and Revised	Looked through artist portfolios to try to find an illustrator whose style matched the story.
Sent out rough draft to friends and family to review and give ideas and critique	Sent out requests to illustrators I liked to discuss time schedule and cost.
Fixed the many, many grammatical errors and typos that I didn't notice when blasting out that rough draft	Found Matthew Gauvin! Lucked out with a great artist who was willing to work with me at a reasonable rate and decided on a six month timeline.
Added in some extra scenes that were suggested by my rough draft readers.	Decided how many illustrations to draw and made sure they were well spaced throughout the book
Went over entire book smoothing out and revising scenes.	Matthew created rough sketches for each of the illustrations and sent them back and forth to me to decide exactly how we wanted each scene to be set.
Continued revising...	Matthew drew the same picture with different mediums to try to determine the one which looked the best for our book. We decided the ink shaded version was the best for this book.
Added in title page, table of contents, and chapter headers.	Matthew drew each illustration we had discussed sending me updates and making revisions as we went.
Placed all the illustrations at their appropriate location and size in the story.	Matthew went back over each illustration and fixed smudges and made last minute touchups. then he scanned each image into the computer. Put it into photoshop and edited for contrast, lighting, etc. When he was done he emailed me each finalized image.