A New Picture Book is in the Works!

I’ve written a new picture book and Book Dummy #5 is now complete.

You may remember that I wrote a picture book late last year called Benny the Bookworm which is an alliterative story in which: Benny LOVES books, but being a worm has its disadvantages. He befriends Beatrice the butterfly to help with the heavy lifting but when Benny pushes Beatrice away to keep the books all to himself, he’ll end up alone in a bind without her there to help him.

While writing Benny’s story, I always had another alliterative tale in mind that could go along in a series. This time around, it was to be about an arachnid. A widow spider named Whimsy.

It was known around Weyburn that should you be in want of a wish, Whimsy was the widow who held them.

And so Whimsy’s story begins.

The name Wishweaver came easily to me, for that is precisely what Whimsy is. I was in love with Whimsy and her story from the minute she made her way into my imagination. So, now her tale has been told in the pages of my book dummy equipped with all of my illustration ideas that could be seen throughout the book (should future art directors so desire).

The process of creating a picture book for me starts with writing the manuscript. Then once I have that fleshed out enough, I take the words and begin separating the possible page spreads and deciding if the story fits better as a 32-page or 40-page picture book. So far, 40-page has been where my stories have ended up. I attribute that to the fact that I love illustrating and I want to show so much through pictures, 32-pages just doesn’t seem like enough!

Next up, comes rough…and I mean rough…sketches of each spread. “The messier the better!” is what my instructor from Storyteller Academy, Arree Chung, always says. Though the perfectionist in me finds this difficult, with Wishweaver I gave it a try. As you can see, Whimsy’s look changes from the rough sketches to the more polished illustrations but many of the spread ideas have stayed the same.

Once I finished up all the polished spreads for the book dummy, I went back just yesterday and completed the spreads for the end pages, title/dedication page, and the cover art.

The process for those is the same: rough sketch to start, pick a favorite, draw a more polished final sketch, and ink it in.

(This next paragraph is a bit technical with the process for making the book dummy hard copy, so you can skip ahead should you wish!)

Once all the sketches are finished and I’ve compiled a PDF through Genius Scan (amazing app to take photos of images/documents and save them together as a PDF), I open the file in Photoshop and overlay the text on each spread. Once everything looks good and all separate images are saved as .PSD and .JPEG files, I go back into Genius Scan and re-upload the documents from Dropbox into a new PDF of the completed dummy. I can email the file to myself and print it off and then tape it all together to make the book dummy as you see it in the pictures above and below.

This story is with my amazing critique group that I found through

Storyteller Academy