DAY FOUR: WRITING AND ILLUSTRATING A PICTURE BOOK

PHASE TWO: Step 1

1. SKETCH AND WRITE: this is a hard stage to describe if you are doing both the illustrating and writing of a book. Many times I'll sketch out ideas of scenes of the character trying to solve the problem before I've even written words. I'm a visual person as well as a verbal person, so a lot of times, I simply go back and forth between words and sketching. However, in this phase, there is often MORE writing than sketching going on overall. For the standard format picture book, you introduce the character and the problem, you have the character try three times to solve it, and in the end he/she does. The final page should be a punchline of some sort or a line that makes you wonder what will happen next.