Planning My New Story

Yesterday was my 2nd day purely dedicated to working on Lila and Sausage! Below is my new introduction to Jack and Killer. They are now going to appear through Lila's bedroom window, so we know Jack is a little boy that lives over the road (thanks for the idea Cass!).

Although I now have a story-line worked out, I had to sort out the structure before I could do much more drawing. A standard picture book is always the same length: 14 illustrated spreads (double pages). It's no good if it doesn't fit that format.

The best way to get it straight, was to draw 14 rectangles on a piece of paper and see if I could slot the story into them, without running out of space. Guess what? I ran out of space. I needed about 3 more spreads ideally.


So I have been trimming away, deciding which parts of the story can be combined into one image, and losing anything that's not vital.

Once I got it squeezed into the format, I wrote out the text for each page alongside the thumbnails: a good exercise in editing, as it must be trimmed down to the least words possible, to make room for the illustrations, but without losing the sense of the story, or the reader's emotional engagement.

So I now have a proper draft of the story typed out, a plan for each page and very rough sketches of most of the major elements. It's coming along and I already feel less stressed about the Nov 19th deadline!