When I first sit down to illustrate a book, I usually begin by creating “Storyboards”. Storyboards are like a map which shows an illustrator all of the pages of a book at once. I wanted my book to be 32 pages long, so I took some paper and drew 32 little boxes on it. Each little box represented a page in the book.
From there, I began to draw tiny sketches in each box. These sketches helped me to decide where to put the words, and how many words to put on each page. They also helped to guide the initial design of the book. If you look closely, you can see that some of my little sketches ended up looking very much like the final artwork. Others don’t look anything like what I ended up with.
It’s not important to be PERFECT when you make your storyboards. It’s more important to try to keep an open mind. Storyboarding is very helpful to illustrators, because it lets them see the entire book on one or two sheets of paper. They can read the text and look at their sketches, and get a good idea of the “flow” of the book. Sometimes the sketches will need to be changed, or lines of text may need to be added or moved... or even dropped. But it’s much easier to do those things at this stage. It’s much easier to re-draw a sketch than it is to re-paint an entire illustration.
Most movie directors start the filmmaking process by “storyboarding”, too. They have walls and walls of little drawings which map out each scene in their movie. This way they can make changes in their film before they begin shooting. It saves them a lot of time and money.
