Sketches: The Hollywood Canteen

Sometimes, you have what you think could be a good idea, but it takes more effort than you expected to get to “there.”


I did a few sketchier-than-usual sketches for this book on my iPad. I have a stylus, and I like it a lot, as styluses (styli?) go, but I still miss the control and precision I get with pen and paper (even with a big ol’ Sharpie marker). This point in the process is (or should be) one of discovery, of taking ideas out of my head and putting them into a form that I can follow through on — but I felt like the lack of control in what I was drawing was a big, big distraction. Maybe I should loosen up and learn to embrace that. I dunno, maybe I will.

Had a thought about using the title as a sort of “dividing” element between two photos, but gave up on that when I found the perfect photo. Or, almost the perfect photo. There was another, of a short dumpling of a man in uniform with a comical expression of delight on his face, in a slow dance with a beautiful woman who was at least a foot taller than he was. (Her hair was swept up, it was difficult to be sure.) And you probably wouldn’t have recognized the actress.

No mistaking pin-up girl Rita Hayworth, though, on a crowded dance floor filled with servicemen. There couldn’t have been a better cover photo for this book.

As you can see from the sketches, I had wanted to put the subhed between the two parts of the title, to use that space better. (There’s always the concern that it will be read as “Title-Subhed-Title” instead of “Title-Subhed,” but it can work, and anyway, I wanted to try it.) That turned out to be much more difficult that I had anticipated, trying to balance the way everything fit together with the size of the elements — I didn’t want the book title to be too big, but I didn’t want the subhed to be too small — et cetera, et cetera. So much so that I just gave up on the idea at first.



(I tried a variation on that photo tinted dark blue, too, but the highlights on Rita Hayworth were so bright that the contrast made them look too hard.)

But I got kinda stubborn, and when I came back to this, I decided, y’know, there ought to be a way to make this work. And that took a few further adjustments (there’s another version of this version that had the subhed overlap the word “Hollywood” differently, but that didn’t seem as legible), but I think I finally have everything sorted out. Except for the back cover, which isn’t finished yet.