My First Picture Book Dummy Part 6 - Finals

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

I've lapsed in my writing of this series for a few weeks because I was on holiday and was trying to work as little as possible, but I suppose that's it's own blog post.

I mentioned in a previous post in this series that I still have a few roughs to finish before my book dummy will be complete. This hasn't stopped me from moving ahead to finish some of the final spreads. I was getting stuck on the last roughs and it was frustrating so I followed a piece of advice I got long ago that I often turn to. The advice is this, "Do what you know first, the rest will work itself out after". This is usually applied within one drawing, but can also be used in a bigger project.

In the case of my book dummy it's my hope that seeing a few finished pieces will help inspire me to push through those last problematic roughs, and help to inform them as well.

Once I decided to move on to completing a few pieces I had to decide which to complete. I had two options as I saw it. I could do the first few in the book so that the viewer would read the rest of the book knowing to a fair degree how the roughs will look when done. Or I could do the spreads that I felt would best showcase the characters, colours, and settings. My decision was to do a little of both.

Cover that still needs a title etc.

Title page, this image get reduced

First spread of the story, text will go on left of the spread

Second spread of the story

Beyond completing the cover which was an obvious decision I chose to finish two early spreads plus one in the middle that I was particularly jazzed about. I may also finish one at the end of the book to follow the portfolio principal of starting and ending strong, but I'm not sure how necessary it is. I'll show the middle piece that I finished in a later post about my promotional efforts since I'm using it as a mailer.

The cover was the first piece I finished because I wanted to nail down the main two characters, the girl and the tiger. Then I was also able to use it as a colour guide. I may revisit it though. My original idea was to have the girl riding the tiger and I may go back to that concept, what do you think? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on twitter @marcuscutler.

Excelsior!