My First Picture Book Dummy Part 5 - Roughs

Part 1 - Concept And Inspiration
Part 2 - Writing
Part 3 - Thumbnails
Part 4 - Character Design 
Part 5 - Roughs 
Part 6 - Finals

After all the prep work was done for my picture book dummy came the best part, the drawing!

In my post on creating thumbnails for my picture book dummy I wrote about how I moved on from tiny thumbnail drawings to large ones which were really more like preliminary roughs as you can see below.

Preliminary Roughs

I used to do all my rough sketches by hand in a sketchbook and it involved sooooo much erasing and overdrawing. It seems some people just know where to put every line, but that's definitely not me. I'm the trial and error type.

I made the switch to sketching on the computer at my old in-house job. A co-worker said I was nuts. She was way better than me (someone who just knows where to put every line) so I took her advice and put some effort into training myself to draw on the screen. It was really unnatural at first but like any new tool it just takes a bit of time. Now I could never go back.


All my dummy roughs were drawn in photoshop. I use lots of layers so every element can be moved around.

Then, when I was ready to move onto the polished roughs I drew right over top of my preliminaries.

Polished Roughs

These sketches are more refined than my typical roughs. That's because only a few will progress into full coloured pieces for the dummy. Picture book dummies have mostly sketches since if a book is accepted changes will likely need to be made. For this reason the sketches need to be strong enough on their own so that the finished product is easy to visualize.

This was a lengthy process and I was fortunate that I had a big dry spell in my commisioned work to plow through most of it. I have a couple yet to finish but couldn't help myself from moving on to complete a few pieces. There's my impatience showing itself again. Now that I'm once again swamped by commissioned work I'll have to figure in some time to finish those last ones soon.

Check back to my next post to see the completed versions of the above sketches.

Excelsior!