What to draw next and other mumblings.

I like to have art work on the go at all times.  As illustration is my main driver, the work needs to have some narrative to keep me interested.  Having plenty to do keeps me happy.  An ideal day would be a morning working in the garden (and similar activities), followed by an afternoon drawing.  I've just come out of a few weeks period of medically induced indolence, where all I wanted to do was study my navel.  I've been struggling a bit about what to do next art-wise. My son is aware of this and has come up with a suggestion.  He works at a respite care home.  One of his jobs is finding things to do for his clients.  These are people who've had illnesses and accidents that have left them disabled.  By comparison, my woes are trivial as I can still do stuff.  He takes them out to places like Beaulieu, and on boating trips etc.  When confined to the respite center, he gets them playing musical instruments (my son is a musician), a group of them produce a jokey newsletter once a month, and another has written a short story. The story is a tongue in cheek horror tale, my son helped him put it together.  It would be nice to have it turned into an actual book.  That's where I come in.  The story is too short for a book, but not if it's illustrated.  I think it's a good yarn.  It'll take a fair bit of work, but there's no rush.  No deadline. The first decision is what form will the book take.  For a number of years I've produced books of my art...purely personal things...I keep my stuff on line, but that's not reliable.  It's great to have a paper version in book form, which means I needn't keep the masses of drawings I produce.  (I do keep some of the originals).  Most of the books are a4 size, either in portrait or landscape format.  These seem too big for this project, there won't be masses of text on the pages.  In a4 size the text would be too big.  My son likes the last art book I made about 3 years ago.  A smaller, square shaped book, the pages are 21 x 21cm.  Here's that book... ...it's all black and white.  There's a hard cover and thick lay-flat pages.  Obviously it's mostly pictures, but I did include some text.  Here's the first page... So we've decided on the book format.  Now for the FONTS.  My wobbly writing is a no-no.  I chose this font because to me  it looks like it was done with a dip-pen.  That, I felt, went with my book of black and white drawings.  I like it for the new book.  The font is called chiller.  At the moment the jury is out of that.  There are as many opinions about fonts as there are fonts. I would have liked to have drawn everything just in pen and ink (my favourite medium), but it takes me too long.  I'm very likely to give up on that, so the graphic style will be pen and wash.  It'll be cartoony and what passes as my 'loose' style.  My sketchbooks are full of this, a quickish, easy sketchy style.   Here's my stab at the front cover for the book... ...this will change, it needs the author's name.  I'm assembling this in my ancient version of photoshop in a file format that enables me to change things easily. Odd name isn't it?  But it's a jokey tale.  Had me wondering if it's ever been used as a surname.  Wouldn't you know it?  It has.  So has the word DEATH, even more so...over 300,000 in the UK apparently.  Some of the posher types add an apostrophe making it De'ath.   The book will be mostly text with a spot drawing on the same page.  Occasionally, there'll be a full page illustration accompanied by a full page of text.  Here's a full page pic I've done in this sketchy style.  It comes at the start of the book.  A married couple, living in a shambling falling to ruins castle get a visit from the council with a compulsory purchase order and plans to flatten the castle... My scribbly trees are not very good.  I don't do landscapes, I'll have to look at Alan's sketches and do a spot of cribbing. The book will be a photobook, there are masses of companies out there.  They all frequently do offers, if we wait for one of those it'll cost around £25-£30, not too bad a price.  Got to draw it all first.  I'll let you know how things develop, if you're interested. 

You're right Alan, something ongoing  like this IS what I need right now. We considered A4 landscape format.  That would allow plenty of room for a drawing and text on the same page.  I tried one a4 landscape layout on the photobook app, and it needed too large a font to look visually appealing.  So we opted for the square smaller format.  The intention is to have the same size font on all the pages for the narrative text.  On the few pages I've done in the square book it looks OK. 

Thanks for  the encouragement.  This is a short story, it's three and a half pages of single-space typing.  I've spent time breaking the narrative down into pages.  For the most part there'll only be a couple of sentences on a page (with a spot drawing).  Here and there there'll be a full page illustration, they will be accompanied by a full page of text (not massively dense).  The minimum number of pages for these photobooks is 24, provisionally I'm planning on 26 pages.  You can add pages easily, two at a time obviously, but can't have less than 24.  For the font, I'm expecting to use a fairly standard font for clarity, so my chiller font is out.  (It suited me for my book of drawings, but not this one). We've been looking at fonts, here's a few try-outs stuck on a page with a spot drawing... Alan, I had a look at your script font that you mentioned, it's great.  Kudos to you.  (I've put it on the try-outs page above, because I think people should see it.  We won't be using a script font...I know you didn't suggest it for that, merely mentioning it in passing, but I think it's one of the best script fonts I've seen.) I've been looking at illustrated books that I own.  They use clear 'straightforward' fonts for the main text, with the occasional flight of fantasy for titles or chapters.  No chapters in this story.  I am leaning towards something like Tw Cen MT in the try-outs above.