For the benefit of our viewers some words will now have roll over explanations. We have italicized them as well so you know which ones.
Efficient Design
As I mentioned before due to the nature of this book the characters, foreground and backgrounds are drawn on separate layers like in a animated cartoon. In my working process I draw the environments out fully with [tooltip text=”Little silhouettes or scribbles that mark where the characters are going to be or their scale to the environment. They use it a lot in game and movie development.”]place-marker characters[/tooltip] (the lighter blue scribbles) so that if the scene environments need to be changed I don’t have to redraw the characters as well.
Static Motion
Even though books are a [tooltip text=”it doesn’t move like an animation or video does”]static visual[/tooltip] the viewer’s eye still needs to flow through the action on the page. You can see an example of this below. As you can see in the image the characters are placed in such a way that they lead your eye through the scene.
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Guest Video
And here’s a guest video of illustrator Kevin Henkes talking about making picture books.
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This concludes the third segment of The Making of a Picture Book. Thank you for joining me on this journey and I hope you will join me again for further installments.