Winter's Progress and Children's Book Progress

Work on the children's book is going along great!  It is a lot of work, but I am having a blast.  The biggest challenge was getting up the learning curve on the newest version of Photoshop.  I finally broke down and bought a subscription from Adobe.  My version of Photoshop was six years old.  What a difference.  I must have watched 30 hours of YouTube videos and tutorials before I finally was able to understand the software enough to proceed.  I must admit the software is like magic.

The book uses a poem and graphics to trace Earth's geologic development featuring nine rocks through time.  The poem was written first, which was a lot of fun to create.  Then I searched for graphics needed to tell the story.  I am using a combination of my own photographs and diagrams as well as images I purchased licenses through Shutterstock.  I am using Photoshop to develop my own graphics, page layouts, and covers.  In the back of the book there is a rock cycle diagram, a chart explaining mineral evolution and how and why the number of minerals on Earth has changed over time, and a glossary.  I am almost done with the preliminary page layouts for the poetry pages.  Then I'll work on the pages at the end of the book.  I have read the poem to a few people so far.  Feedback has exceeded my expectations!

Since we have been socked in with on and off again lake effect snow for the past two weeks, I wondered what the snow coverage in the U.S. has looked like over the past month.  The maps are from the webpage https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/snow-and-ice/snow-cover/.

November 15th...

November 30th....

December 17th...