Designing picture books is challenging. I’m wrestling with this now as I do sketches for “The Little Spider”.
If you think all you need are a bunch of related illustrations and some simple text, you are not writing and have never written such a book.
The Framework
There are two themes to a picture book. One is the text story. The other is the picture story. They are separate, yet they merge the two into a whole.
Although these books are no longer limited to 32 pages, they do usually have a page total divisible by four. This has to do with how the books are printed.
The Text
The amount of text depends on the age range of the intended reader or listener. Very young children have books with very little text with a limited vocabulary. Very good examples were written by Dr. Seuss.
As the age of the reader increases, the amount of text increases. The books become more like illustrated stories.
“The Little Spider” is for the younger set so the text is limited and repetitive. The illustrations help by showing what the text is talking about.
The Illustrations
Often the person doing the illustrations is not the person doing the text. Instead, that person is known for their art be it watercolor, pen and ink, decoupage, pencil or many other possibilities.
I and many other authors do both the text and illustrations. This gives the author more control over how the two work together in the book.
“The Little Spider”
This book is a simple story of a small spider that balloons to a new location. To do this, the little spider must find a high place and spin a line of silk for the wind to carry it off.
In designing picture books like this one, I first write out a series of text lines. The repetitive line is “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” This is found on the left page as the little spider ends each attempt and goes on to the next. The next action begins on the right page.
So far, my little spider has had seven attempts covering 14 pages. That leaves me devising seven more adventures.
