A Little Bit Stuck

These past two weeks, I have gotten a little sidetracked. I watched some lessons on how to make/illustrate children's books, started on a few other artistic endeavors and worked on other non-art related tasks. 

When I finally sat down to work on another page illustration for The Little Tiger From India, I realized I had been avoiding it. There are lots of decisions to be made at this point. 

An Unfinished sketch of "The Stranger"

Do I do all the illustrations before putting on the text?

What size do I make the text?

Should I print out the text and glue it in place so I know where it will go?

Where should the text go?

What margins should I have?

How do you do those little text boxes when the text doesn't go straight across the page?

Should I really being doing all this in some computer program so I can mess around with the format and not have to re-draw everything when I need move something over half a centimetre?

(The English Writer part of my brain is screaming at me for having so many questions in a row, yet they serve to convey the reason I've been a little bit stuck.)

Time to remind myself that I need not do it "the best" nor even "the right" way. I just need to make some decisions and get on with it. 

I do believe printing out the text and pasting it into the approximate location will be helpful. I'm considering making a document with the same dimensions at my book to experiment with different shapes of the text on the page. Also, as much as I hate too, I believe I may need to draw some margin lines onto my rough to keep everything in place. 

These, I believe, are sufficient goals for this next week. Certainly not as entertaining as pictures, yet necessary to the overall quality of the piece.