Storyboarding & Illustrations

🗓️ 63 Days Until Publish

For those of you that have been following this journey since the beginning, you know that the first few weeks have been planning, choosing a publisher, and working on the manuscript. Now with most of that in place, it was time to start attacking the most daunting part of this whole endeavor…the illustrations. (Gulp)

I have loved to draw since I was a kid. Some of my favorite times growing up was when I would get a brand spankin’ new sketch pad. The blank canvas always offered infinite possibilities and I would spend hours filling their pages with all sorts of different, and often ridiculous, characters.

I taught myself how to draw simply by looking at other illustrations and trying to recreate them freehand. I never had any training, I just kind of figured it out on my own. I eventually moved on from copying other characters to creating my own. My first real character that I was proud of was PaperBag Man. He was an upside down paper bag with arms and legs and a huge nose who of course, fought crime. (Side note: I feel like somehow this comic was used as inspiration for SpongeBob SquarePants. My comic was ‘92. SB was ‘99…just saying.)

This comic was the first, and only, comic I ever completed. I started many different stories over the years but stopped before they were completed simply because I couldn’t get the images to look just right. I hated eraser lines so if I messed up at all, I would stop and move to a new blank page. That’s why this part feels so intimidating. Because it has always been the reason I have given up in the past.

That being the case, I knew I needed to be intentional about how I approached this part of the journey. The first thing I did was to lay out the entire book. To do this I created a storyboard. I drew 32 squares to represent the page layouts and then started sketching out the different possible scenes. This helped me get a sense of the types of images I needed to create. It also helped me think of some fun visual elements to add to the story as well.

Once I had this I got to work on the individual pages. I started with the ones that I knew I could do well. Those were really fun. But there are some that I already know are going to push my artistic abilities to their limits. I will probably save those for last. I am just taking it one page at a time. And while I am still finalizing exactly what style the book will be, I do know this, it will look more comic book than art-house. It’s just always been my go-to.

Status Update: I found a copy editor!

Next Email: Illustration Exploration & Style

Thanks for reading!

Kacy