Marshall's Book Update: The Process So Far

Hello Internet Perusers, For the past few months I have been working on the illustrations for a children’s book coming out about a special little dog (ok, medium sized dog) named Marshall who didn’t have the best life in the beginning.  Don’t you worry though, he’s living the happy life now that all puppies (and animals on the whole) deserve.  The book uses his story of hardship to recovery as its inspiration, and you will all be missing out if you don’t give it a gander when it’s finished.  Technically you should do more than give it a gander to help support it, but I won’t start with the nagging quite yet.

So who wants to know what my part of the book making process has entailed so far?  [Turns on cheer track].  Oh goodness guys, you’re making me blush…  I’ll try not to get too boring in my explanations so you don’t regret those prerecorded cheers, but this has been quite the learning process for me so far, so why not share it?

School: It Really Is Good For Learning

Something I learned in my scenic design class during my theatre design majoring was to start with a “set list,” mapping out where every scene takes place throughout the play.  Obviously this isn’t a play, but the same idea applies to a book in my opinion.  In other words, I made a spreadsheet to help me map out where each page takes place.  By the end of the process it will be interesting to see how closely this list still applies to my final drawings, but I could not recommend this step enough because just simply being able to look over a list helped my process with imagining scenes for pages since there are a decent number of words per page, so I could refresh my memory of each page at a glance.  Write down the location, what is happening, who’s in it, etc., whatever info seems important.

I went to the first meeting with Cyndi Willenbrock (the author and Marshall’s human mom) with this list in hand since it was mainly just a meet and greet and to get an idea of what she was looking for, and after that the sketching could begin.  Long story short, I sketched out ideas for most of the pages, with a few of those still being around now in a full blown kind of way.

Storyboarding

Eventually some professionals in the business came in to help channel my work in the right direction.  And first thing was first: storyboards.  What?  You mean I can’t go straight from my rough sketches to final drawings?  Oh the hardship!  At first the process was described as this: storyboard 1, storyboard 2, rough draft 1, rough draft 2, and final copy.  This sounded like a whole heck of a lot of repetition that will put my detail oriented drawing style to the test, but half way through I am really starting to understand the importance.

That’s right, storyboarding isn’t just for directors to map out a film or play.  Like the “set list” and rough sketches I did before to just get ideas out, the storyboarding is probably the most important step in the process because it allows you to see the overall flow and look of the book on the small scale before doing large drawings.  Here are the steps I took:

Grab supplies with a smile on face and refreshments in hand.  The most important item?  The ruler.  That’s right boys and girls, it’s time to get my measuring on!  Ok, technically the pencil is more important, but shush.  In order to get the most out of my 11x14” sketchpad, I decided to go with 2.5x5” spreads (a spread is the combination of the two pages when a book lies open).  Tiny, for sure, but it gets the job done.

While I was working on these I decided to look through some other children’s books once more, and the one thing I noticed was that a lot of illustrators go with illustrating the spread with one image instead of having one illustration per page, which was what I started with.  Because of this, I basically had to decide what the most important images were from the words, and illustrate those instead of going for illustrating all of the action (which I have to admit, I was originally drawn to do considering how much I love comic books).

Wanna see what I came up with?  Of course you do, made up audience in my head who never fails to respond to my questions!  So here you go!

Final Thoughts:

With Cyndi as my advocate, I am actually getting to skip the draft process and move straight to colored pencils, something that most likely rarely happens and may never happen again for me.  Obviously, if there is one thing I have learned so far, it is that this is quite the evolutionary process, and I hope all of you are just as excited as I am to see how the book, and my drawings, turns out in the end.

Until next time! Lauren H Follow @BewareOfTrees