WANDER WORLD

Check out the illustrations from start to finish!

IDEA & CHARACTER SKETCHES

Starting anything from scratch is a tough thing to do. But having idea sketches is important!

In this stage, you take the ideas that are floating around in your head and put them down on paper, very, very quickly.

This can look messy, and not like a book at all, but it's important to do to help figure out your characters, setting, and overall look of your book.

Then, you take your characters, the ones you have pictured in your mind, and create a few sketches of them from different angles. Keep doing this until you have them exactly how you want them!

As you can see, my characters went through many revisions.

BOOK DUMMY

No, I'm not calling the book a dummy.

A book dummy is when you create a quickly sketched, miniature version of the book. This is usually done on plain white paper, and is shape and size of the real book. This is also the place where you decide if your book will be 32 or 40 pages, and if it will be open-ended, or self-ended.

Sometimes, it takes 10 or more dummies before you get what you want!

I ended up creating 6 dummies for this particular book. This is my first dummy, and as you can see, it's rough!

PRELIMINARY ART

Now that you have the book set up just how you want it, you need to do a full size mock up of your final book.

This can also be done several times, since blowing your drawings up can change the way they look.

Once you are happy with the way it looks, you can move on to final art!

This particular page was one of my favorites from the start!

FINAL ART

If you like drawing and painting, now, it's time for some fun! Final art can also go in stages, if you aren't happy with a page, you may have to make changes.

Final art can be done by hand with different types of media, digitally with special tools like an iPad and pencil, or a Wacom tablet, or a mixture of both.

The final art for Wander World was drawn by hand and painted using watercolors. Once the final art was finished, it was scanned in and digitally enhanced using a iPad. Since this was the first time I've worked digitally, I made A LOT of mistakes and even had to splice together my artwork since my scanner wasn't big enough to scan my images. Once your images are done, it's time for some formatting.

Visiting Grandma and Grandpa one day, there was not much to do, so I wanted to play. ..png

FORMATTING

If you are both author and illustrator of your book, you will need to format your book after the artwork is finished.

To do this, you can use many different programs like Microsoft Power Point, Apple Pages, Canva, or Photoshop.

This is where you will make sure your illustrations look good, (they should be at least 300dpi, are cropped right, are the right size, have bleed (or no bleed) and insert the text.

Once this is complete, you are ready to publish your book!