It all starts for me with single images. I’ll be doodling and I’ll make single images. And then words, some words will come up and then I’ll make more images. Imagine it this way, for me it’s not a line, it’s not idea, sketches, art work, outline, writing; it’s not a linear thing. It’s more like a spider web.
If you imagine the finished book is in the middle and you start somewhere at the top and you move down a little and then you go back and then you’re around and then you’re back and you go
It’s words, picture, words, pictures, and then they start, it starts to form some sort of a story board looking thing. Then I put a story board together, put it up on the wall, look at it from a distance, move the text around, take it in, take it out.
It always begins with more text, because the pictures will eventually say things that you’ve already said. I shouldn’t do this, but I’m guilty of writing something about the sunset, because how can you help it if you’re a writer, you want to say what the sunset looks like.
But if it’s a picture, take out the sunset. If you’re teaching picture books, have the kids write what they write and then take out all the adjectives and adverbs and have them re-write, because that kind of stuff is going to be seen in the pictures. I have this story board. An essential part is putting it into a dummy, into a book form, because a picture book is a unique art form and it’s unique because it does something different than other art forms.
What happens is when you go from this page to this page, when you make the page turn, your brain, your mind fills in what happens in between. I always give this example, imagine I’m standing here and there’s an elephant next to me, and I’m holding a bucket of green paint. You turn the page, I’m flat as a pancake and the elephant is dripping green paint.
Well, I didn’t tell you what happened in between those two pages. But the great wonder of picture books is they allow that reader to go half way. This is something that took me a while to learn because you know you don’t want to hold back, you want to give all the information, you want to show them everything.
But the problem with that is that they’re not involved then, they need to be, they need to be inside the book with you. When you get it in a dummy form you understand those page turns much more, you understand suspense, you understand a surprise when you put it in that. Once the dummy is set up you can start making more finished drawings.