Writing the Story for My Next Children's Picture Book

Today I gathered together the sketchbooks, pencils, and pens that I’m going to use for my next children’s picture book. It’s a simple kit: an 11x14 sketchbook for practicing drawing my characters and 8.5x11 Bristol board for the inking. I’ll create the storyboard in the big sketchbook — I like to draw big when I’m brainstorming.

I’ll be sketching with pencil and use my light pad for inking on the Bristol board with Rotring Tikky fine liners. For the color, I’ll do that digitally. I’m going to stick with my Frankentoon Crayon color palette.

There a lot of good reasons for just doing everything on the iPad, but I’m convinced that my traditional media drawings look more interesting. They look like a human made them.

The hardest part of creating a book, and the most important part, is writing the story itself. I’ve learned that just sitting down and getting started requires ignoring all of the reasons my mind is giving me to procrastinate, but once I’ve put a few lines on the blank sketchbook, I can feel the momentum shift. I know that I’m moving forward, an inch at a time, and that I will continue to move forward until the book is published. It’s really cool to be on the road again.

I’m aiming for about 40 pages, the same as the last book. Instead of using the square 8x8-inch format I used in my first book, I’m going to go with an A5 size. A5 proportions will work well for both the portrait layout print version and landscape layout ePub version. I learned with my first book that having a single image size saves time. Engraved in my mind is this truth: “Choose one size to fit all formats…and stick with it!” A5 it is.

For today’s sketches I returned to Jack Hamm’s Drawing the Head and Figure and drew some heads. His style is dated and corny, but he’s an amazing comic artist. I know that I can learn a lot from going through his books and copying his work. I’ll have to draw each of these faces dozens of times to become fluent at drawing heads. Learning a new skill requires repetition, which takes time. Fortunately, I’ve learned to be patient when I’m learning new stuff.

I sketched these faces with a flat carpenter’s pencil. I’ll draw them all again tomorrow.