Wee Puffling - roughs

When I'm making a picture book I draw as I write. I find it hard write a story without the pictures so when I send my ideas to my editor and art director it looks like this... 

Page turns are really important in picture books so it helps me to edit my work if I lay it out like a book.  The thing that's really important to know is that in these idea stages your drawings can look like this. They can look better, they can look worse, but there's a reason they are called roughs and so my drawings are exactly that. It's important I show composition and where the text will fit but more detail is not required. At this early stage things are easier to move around, and they often will move, if they're kept simple. All I've marked in is the blue of the sea, and that was just for clarity. The sea plays and important part in the book and I think it helps make sense of the picture. 

This image didn't change too drastically throughout but this was the next stage...

As you can see I needed more puffins. Also the art director has set the text in the font we're using at the correct size which helps me to size the speech bubbles. If anything needs to move this will be discussed and suggested by the art director too, it just hasn't happened on this particular page.

At this stage some editors and art directors may want to see colour ideas or main character drawings but I'd worked with this publisher before so I wasn't asked for any of this. I also rarely plan colours ahead but I send artwork as and when I have it early on to get their feedback and make sure we're all happy with how it's looking.

Here's the final image...

You can see that we've changed the opening line. We played around with this quite a bit. This book is sort of a cousin to Wee Unicorn so we wanted the opening line to echo the first line of that book, and to make sure it was really clear to readers what was happening.

Wee Puffling is out now!

Roughs

When you illustrate a book you go through a stage called roughs. These are ideas of what will be drawn on every page of the book, bearing in mind where text will fit, and as their name suggests they are rough drawings. There are varieties of roughs though. I've seen some much looser than mine, and others so polished they look like finished artwork. Because picture books are so much about the images I make my roughs while I write. I can't separate the two processes.

Watts and Whiskerton is a highly illustrated young fiction book and I wanted the illustrations to be as important as the text. They hold visual pieces of information and readers will flit between the body of text, illustrations with speech bubbles and little comic strips. It sort of looks like the inside of my head. This is how I think. So as I wrote the first draft I created an even rougher set of roughs to send to the editor with the text to help her make sense of the book. It also really helped me pace the page turns and develop the plot. I call these rough roughs.

Here is the rough rough of the museum.

At this stage it's not necessary for me to know what the little details in the book will be, and to be honest I was scared to draw a whole museum.

Once the text was finalised and set by the art director, Sarah, we flipped the image to make sure the text was read before the 'Wow!' and more detail was added. This is the proper rough, there's a whole chunk of time scheduled to make these. This a simple spread but on others we had to cut text to fit or adjust the layout altogether.

The pink part is where you can't put any important information in case it gets chopped off.

This is the final image.

The black line is where the pages will be cut.

The details include some exhibits for Watts and Whiskerton to investigate later and nods to some famous paintings including A Bigger Splash by David Hockney because a swimming pool is a plot point in the book.

Watts and Whiskerton; Buried Bones and Troublesome Treasure publishes July 4th 2024 and is available to buy by clicking here.