creating a picture book dummy

So I have a few things on the go...but everything working toward my picture book. It's such a fun project. I love the idea, the story still needs some tweaking, as do my storyboards, but all in all I'm feeling really excited about the project.


I have just started taking yet another class from my favorite duo - Will Terry and Jake Paker and their amazing School of Visual Storytelling. It's a composition class and has me thinking about thumbnails and compositional sketches and how I may need to tweak the sketches I have already done.

In the first class Jake was talking about how he frst creates boxes the size of his final drawings in Photoshop and then transforms them into small thumbnails of the same proportions to work on as he plays with his ideas. He'll often add text to the bottom of each frame so he has everything all together.

That lead me to think about what the final size of my page should be and I came across this great blog post which to summarized suggested sticking close to an 8x10 page which is most common.

Now in an earlier class,  Jake Parker explained that he works on a 8.5x11 page or  17x11 for a full page spread at 300 dpi. When he shrinks down his thumbnails, they are around 2x4.  Next he enlarges his thumbnails to double the size and does more refined sketches. These are the sketches he would send to the editor in a .pdf at about 150 dpi.

So I'm off to tweak my current thumbnails and work on some larger compositional sketches .