I’ve been so afraid of the idea of making picture books. Not just illustrating someone else’s concept and words, but I mean coming up with the whole thing on my own. I couldn’t wrap my head around the brainstorming process. I think it tripped me up because picture books are deceptively simple. We’ve all seen books and thought, gee, I could make that. But I’m here to tell you, it ain’t no walk in the park (and by that double negative I don’t actually mean that it is a walk in the park). Coming up with a simple and marketable idea is, in my mind, more difficult than writing a 50 000 word novel in a month (I love NaNoWriMo). Conveying an idea that will touch the heart and/or funny bone of your audience with often less than 500 words is an incredible task. I could continue to write only novels and peddle them out to the kidlit industry, and I would be happy to do that, but my practical nature is gnawing at me. I am both an illustrator and a writer. How inefficient of me is it not put those two things together in my work? I have to do it. My pragmatic self won’t let me off the hook.

So, when I came across Arree Chung’s Storyteller Academy course, I jumped at the chance to have someone help guide me through the process of creating picture books. I’m a forever member of the academy, and that’s a good thing because I joined last summer and have yet to make it through an entire run through of the course due to my own mad schedule. But the bits I’ve digested have helped me tremendously to organize my thoughts and offer me practical tools to brainstorm and develop ideas, and the relationships I’ve made through the community have been valuable. You can check out the course here: https://www.storytelleracademy.com. One of the biggest helps to me has been the encouragement to really use the process of making book dummies to refine the story. Seeing it in book form releases some sort of magical superpower to get past the mental roadblocks. Yeah! Use the dummy as a tool, not just as a product to show around. So simple and so effective. I feel like a dummy for not seeing it sooner. ?

Here is a mess of thumbnails, larger sketches and early dummies for my current project.

I did sketch through the story (a bit like NaNoWriMo) over the course of the month but did it for Inktober. I used the month to focus on my character and see what she was all about. I had a rough story idea to start, but the month took me in a direction I hadn’t really aimed to go. Candy Bee, my main character, turned out to be cheekier with a bit more of a chip on her shoulder than I had originally intended (you can see my Inktober sketches on Instagram, though you will have some scrolling to do). A lot of the sketches I did during Inktober made it into early versions of the dummy, but, through the process of refining, the chip on her shoulder was filed down a bit.
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Here are some photos of my current working dummy. I’m heading to an SCBWI conference soon and hope to have it together enough to bring it along. Follow me on Instagram to see me toil away on this book and other creative projects.