St. Rosaline, the Carthusian: The Saint With the Shining Eyes is an entirely homemade children’s picture book. The only people involved were author Mark Vincent, illustrator Nadia Olson and yours truly who put it all together.

Thanks to Kindle Direct Publishing (KPD), all we needed was an electronic file to upload, a PDF of the completed book.

Mark and I had already divided the book into 24 pages, 22 story pages and 2 glossary pages. We always liked glossaries in picture books. I added a timeline and a map because as a homeschooling mom I had often wished for those in other books.

Nadia used coloring pencils to create her drawings because, besides crayola kids crayons, these were the only medium she had experience with. Coloring pencils produce a rather pale image when scanned. This problem was easily solved by editing the scanned image in Windows Photo Gallery which came with our computer. Here is how it works:

Scan your image at 600 dpi. Open your image in Windows Photo Gallery which is probably the default program photos are opened with on your computer. Click on edit&create on the top tool bar, select edit.

Click adjust.

Click color and slide the color ruler all the way to the right to achieve a more color saturated image. If this is still too pale,click save and repeat. You can also play with the tint, warmth and clarity settings as well as with the light settings.

Compare the two images at the top of this article. Our illustrations turned out beautiful without an expensive image editing program. Besides, I would never have found the time to learn how to use one of those.

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