Monday, October 31, 2011

storyboards for Bye, Bye, Butterflies!



I thought it might be interesting to show how much thought and work go into the early planning for the visuals for a book.  Everyone works a bit differently, but this was my approach.

Once I had read the manuscript for Bye, Bye, Butterflies!, I started by making a lot of notes about the things in the story that stood out to me and the initial images that came to my mind.  Then I doodled very rough layouts in small boxes to see what might work.  I did a lot of those.  Once I had an idea of which layouts seemed to work, I did slightly more refined drawings (but still quite rough) in little boxes that were scaled down from the actual size of the book.  That way I could see all of the spreads for the book on one piece of paper and I could see how they would work together.

My storyboard went through several incarnations as I tried to work out the pacing and figure out the best visuals to tell the story.  Once I was happy with it, I showed it to my editor who gave me very helpful feedback.  Then I used the storyboard to create the proper sketches for the book.

Stay tuned for a peek at some of those...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for sharing!!! I love to look at these wonderful storyboards of yours!!!

Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli said...

Thanks :) I find it really interesting to see where something started and how it evolved into it's final version.