After approving what each character will look like, my illustrator was now tasked with creating the storyboard for each scene in the story. I see this process broken down into 3 distinct parts: The Page Breakdown, Page Sketches, and Final Page Art.

Page Breakdown

To help make her job easier I made a first attempt and breaking down what I thought each page should look like and what I felt could be happening in the story on each page. Now, I am not sure about other illustrators, but mine welcome all my input on how I saw each scene play out and I was very grateful for that opportunity. I also made it clear that if she had an idea that was contrary to what I had offered, I was 100% okay with that. This was a team project.

Here is an example of my Break Breakdown:

Page Sketches

Now that my illustrator has a detailed breakdown of each page, she can get to work on sketching each individual page of the story. This was REALLY FUN! It was so wonderful to begin to see my words come to life in these sketches. The format was the same for each page and consisted of the initial sketch for a page, I would then provide my feedback on her initial sketch with any revisions or additions that I thought might help the story and then my illustrator would make revisions to the sketches, and return it to me for approval. Once the sketch was approved, we would move on to the next page and so on… Here are some of the final sketches that was submitted.

Note: the text is only added to give a sense of where the words could fit for when the book designer steps into the picture.

Storyboard

After all the page sketches have be approved it is time to put it all together in a storyboard to get a sense of what the story will look like when it is fully created. I remember the day that I received my final approved page sketch and how wonderful that felt. It was one of the first times I thought to myself, “Hey, I can actually put this book together!!” Before that, it all seemed a distant dream. Check out the Storyboard below!!

Final Art

The last step in this storyboard process is to create the full color art, called Final Art, to be submitted to the book designer. You will notice that there are no longer words in this artwork. That is because it is the job of the book designer, not the illustrator, to figure out where all the words fit on each page. Here are some examples of the Final Art for each page.