Summer Camp: July 2nd

 

Jumping right in—these are the steps (as I see it) of making a children's book. 

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1) Forming an idea or theme you want to make a book about.

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2) Writing the idea as a story.

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3) Put writing into a 32 pages of a picture book and work out how it reads. (Note I usually create a manuscript with the page numbers in front of the text to indicate the page. This is my initial attempt to play with breaking up the text by pages.) Here is a screen grab of part of a manuscript.

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4) Make a rough dummy dividing text onto the pages and sketches on pages.

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5) Fine tune sketches

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6) As soon as you have one sketch that you are happy with take it to final illustration (The finalizing of this sketch could inform other parts of the book)

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7) Keep refining sketches and creating final illustrations of the books making changes as appropriate. 

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So this is a basic outline of the process. Each of you may have a different starting point. 

 

The Writing Books for Children: For Illustrators course can help you with the beginning steps. There are ways to generate ideas and ways to create cohesive structure in the writing. And when you are ready to make a dummy there are directions on making a different types of dummies. 

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The password for the writing course is: wordplay

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xo,

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—Kristen

 

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