Tag: illustrating picture books

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GKP Writing News

Picture Book Writing

Picture book writing has been on my mind for several reasons. One is the suggestion I teach a homeschool class on writing picture books. These lesson plans seem easy to modify into teaching units for my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Another is the Opal and Agate picture book series I now have three rough texts for.

Picture Book Creation Steps

Picture book writing seems so easy, so straight forward. Step one is the idea. Step two is a rough draft laid out to cover all the necessary pages. Creating the illustrations is Step three. Step four is editing and matching the text to the illustrations. Finally, Step five is to assemble and publish the picture book.

It’s not easy to create a picture book. Ideas are easy, true. But taking an idea into a rough draft is not.

picture book writing needs a character like Opal
Nubian doe High Reaches Drucilla was so proud of her little doe kid Opal. The two remain devoted to each other. Opal is the only kid I have kept for many years and one reason was for her to star in the picture book series.

Opal and Agate

The idea of this series came when Opal was only a day or two old. After all, kids are kids. And I had lots of tales about goat kids. Plus goat kids are cute.

Right off I had a book planned with the beginnings of a rough draft. Except it was not the first book in the series. Where should the series start?

Since Opal and Agate are Nubian dairy goats, perhaps I should first do a book about Nubians. Most people won’t know what they are. To many people goats are the caricatures of hairy, horned, bearded cantankerous creatures.

Now, this picture isn’t totally false. I’ve seen old brush goats that would fit this. But Nubian dairy goats definitely don’t fit this picture.

I worked on this idea. After two or three attempts, I gave up. It was a good idea, but wouldn’t fit into the series.

Now I have two books, one for Agate and one for Opal. These are when they are born. Agate was a bottle baby. Opal was raised by her mother.

Agate is a character in writing picture books
My real Nubian doe Agate is older than Opal. For some reason she ended up being a bottle baby and my special pet.

Teaching Picture Book Creation

The steps are right. They work. However, they are not simple or easy. Somehow this needs to be part of teaching picture book writing too.

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GKP Writing News

Creating Picture Book Pages

When I painted the panels for “Waiting For Fairies”, I painted the entire picture each time. However, I didn’t do that for “For Love of Goats”. Creating picture book pages depends on the illustrations for me.

watercolor image of little spider begins creating picture book pages
My first step for creating the pages for “The Little Spider” was to sketch, then watercolor the main images. The story is about a little spider that goes ballooning to a new home. this image is when the little spider is airborne.

Combining Watercolor and Computer

My picture book pages always begin with watercolor. First I do a rough sketch. Then I add the paint.

As I do the sketches, I am already looking over my ideas for the final illustrations. Although it’s great to do the entire picture in watercolor, sometimes using the computer to do some of it is better. This will be true for “The Little Spider”.

This is especially true for the text. I love doing the lettering, but rarely have all of the text look alike. The computer does all the text with the same lettering making it much easier to read which is important in a picture book.

adding background while creating picture book pages
For this picture book I am combining computer and watercolor images. For this page I started a new page and put a full light blue color. The watercolor image is selected using freehand selection keeping as close to the image as possible. It is copied onto the blue background. Then comes the tedious task of removing any white surrounding the image. I prefer using the eraser rather than painting to do this. It takes several passes using progressively smaller erasers.

“The Little Spider” Illustrations

My watercolor panels are very spare. They tell a simple story. Because the little spider lives in an area with lots of background that obscures that story, I don’t want to add much of it.

To achieve this, I have painted background panels. One is of the ground. It is mostly in shades of brown.

However, this is boring. So another panel has various objects such a small ferns, leaves, rocks, sticks etc. When I add ground to a panel, a few of these objects will get added too.

adding text for creating picture book pages
In my opinion the text in a picture book needs to be simple and easy to read. Personally I like using Georgia font as I like serifs and the rounder shapes than found in Times New Roman. The image has been narrowed for web viewing, so the text may be adjusted later. However, this is close to my final page for this panel. It took close to an hour to complete from creating the background color to adding the text. And this is one of the simpler pages out of the thirty-two for the book.

Background Colors

The sky will appear in several of the illustrations. Yes, I could do a wash of blue. My washes tend to have brush strokes and I would prefer not to have these in the illustrations.

Instead I will use a computer generated blue panel. This makes the sky a flat blue which it is and keeps it definitely in the background with the story scene on top of it.

The same is true of other scenes where I want a green background, but not one to overshadow the watercolor panels. I can add a few grass plants onto the flat background.

Creating picture book pages takes lots of planning and time. For me it also takes combining watercolor and computer to get just the illustrations I want.

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GKP Writing News

Coloring Little Spider

Coloring Little Spider is the easy part. Sort of. Getting all the sketches done was the difficult part.

Planning “The Little Spider”

I did have a rough text list for this picture book. However, as I did the sketches, some of the text didn’t work. There wasn’t enough of it for all the pages of the book.

I went back to the computer and started creating pages. The first one was the title page. then a copyright page. Neither one had a sketch.

Then each drawing was matched to a page and the text was written on the page. Another wrinkle to doing this was keeping the pages on the correct side. There is a right facing page (odd numbers) and a left facing page (even numbers).

Some of the pages didn’t have sketches. These were added to the stack.

Coloring Little Spider

Baby spiders called spiderlings are not the same color as adult spiders usually. Different kinds of spiders have different shapes.

My little spider is a composite, but mostly garden spider. I laid out my paints.

Greens were needed for the plants. Little spider needed ocher yellow, gray and black. Webs and spider silk are white, but this wouldn’t show up, so I’m using thin black lines.

coloring little spider and her journey
The little spider says “The day is warm. I feel the wind. I must hurry.” Why? Follow along to find out as the little spider leaves her web behind and searches for a high place. Her first attempt is a long blade of grass as shown in this image.

Patience?

I like watercolor. It has a really nice look to it and is versatile. Texture comes from layering the paint. Tones come from adding water.

That is the drawback to watercolor. It is a water-based paint. Each color must dry thoroughly before the next one is added.

This takes patience. Rushing lets the colors bleed into one another. I’m not good at patience.

My solution is to work on several sketches at a time. One round I spend coloring little spider. Another round I paint the grass. Still another round is for adding legs to little spider.

This first time through the sketches won’t finish them. I will go back over them to add more texture to the grasses and stems and branches.

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GKP Writing News

Designing Picture Books

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.

photographs for designing picture books
One of the little spider’s adventures is meeting up with a bee in a flower. I took the camera out as the little spider was climbing a chicory stem and met a green native bee in a flower. The bees are camera shy, but I persevered. This picture became a model for some picture book sketches.

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.