Creating Engaging Picture Book Dummies

1. Crafting Engaging Picture Book Mockups: Hi, everyone. This is a class about creating professional and engaging picture book dummies. It's about taking a picture book story and then breaking it down into pages and spreads. And then crafting compelling illustrations to tell that story. Knowing how to create book dummies is a skill that a picture book illustrator needs at all points of their career. As a beginner, book dummies help you draw your characters more consistently and also help you develop your visual storytelling skills. You get a taste of what illustrating full projects is like and use illustrations from your dummy to expand your portfolio. And as a professional picture book illustrator, you create picture book dummies for each project that you work on. I created this class to make it easy for you to create a digital picture book dummy that you can then use to add pieces to your portfolio to catch an agent or an editor's eye. Or if you're self publishing, you can develop your picture book idea to make finished illustrations. Crafting and engaging picture book dummies is a great class for illustrators who are kind of in the beginning to intermediate skill set. And here are the main topics that we're going to be covering. In this class, we'll look at how to break your story into pages and how books are made, book structure. Then we'll talk about thumbnailing and creative layouts. And then after that, we'll look at final sketches, making final art, and then exploiting your art in PDF form. I'll be creating my art and procreate digitally, but I am including a small section in the class where I'm showing you how to take paper sketches and then making a digital PDF copy from those. I'm Mica Hokanen and I'm an award winning picture book author and an illustrator. I'm the creator of the graphic novel series Mass and Tweed and the non fiction series Little Seasons and the picture book series Kitty. And at, if you want to become more confident in your narrative illustration skills and creating digital picture book dummies, then this class is for you. I hope you'll join me. I'll see you in class. 2. About This Class: Welcome to today's class. In today's class, we're going to dive into picture book dummies. We're going to look at the structure of a book to best understand how to set up our dummies. And then after that, we're going to look at pasting our story and thumbnailing. After that, we'll go over some layout ideas and then move to sketching your dummy. You can work either digitally or sketch on paper. I'll be working digitally and procreate. It's fairly easy to follow along if you're working in a different digital program like Photoshop or affinity. Or if you're working with pencil and paper. See the short bonus video on how to scan and create digital dummy from paper sketches. At the end of the class, I provided you with a manuscript in this class that you can practice with. It's the folk story of Henny Penny and it's in the public domain. Which means that you can freely edit it or rewrite it or change it how you want. If you want to use a different story. One tip is to just Google folk stories and many different ones will come up that you can choose from. Examples could be Hansel and Gretel, the three little piglets. Just make sure that it's in the public domain. Or then if you're a writer, feel free to use your very own manuscript. If you want to be a picture book illustrator, you need to know how to make dummies kind of at all different stages of your career. In the beginning, for example, you might feel a little bit lost at what you should do in your portfolio. And taking a story and then illustrating it is a great way to build up pieces that you can include in your portfolio. And it kind of gives you a scaffolding to work on. And doing a full book dummy will also give you an idea of how much work goes into making a book. And it'll give you an idea of what this career is going to be like. And it helps you think creatively and explore different kinds of layouts and different kinds of ideas on how to illustrate the different pages without putting the pressure on you of actually having to work with the publisher. You'll also get practice at drawing characters more consistently, putting them in different poses and also testing out different emotions for them. After making sketches, it's good practice to pick out a handful of different illustrations from your dummy to make into illustrations and then include those into your portfolio. It's a great way to show art directors that you can draw those characters consistently and show them in different environments and different poses with different emotions. Then lastly, if you are new to illustrating and you're not sure what your style is doing, a whole book will also give you an idea of what your style is. Because you're having to draw a whole book, multiple illustrations, maybe 20 illustrations, in the same style. For the intermediate illustrator, you can delve much deeper into character design and interesting layouts. And pick the best pieces from your dummy to include in your portfolio that you then try to catch the attention of art directors and editors and agents with. So if you're just beginning, it might feel a bit daunting to work on a whole book all at once. But we're going to be breaking it down step by step in this class. And hopefully it's going to make it easier for you and also make it really fun. Working on thumbnails and sketches is the most fun part of making a book for myself. I really like the creative process and kind of being able to just throw a whole bunch of thing at the wall and see what sticks. And just get really creative with it and try different layouts and work with characters and figure out what designs I want to do for the whole book. Before we jump and grab our pencils, let's demystify how books are put together so that we don't get bogged down by the nitty gritty of the book formats. So let's jump to the next video and look at parts of the book and proper page accounts. 3. Parts of a Book & Page Count: Let's talk about parts of the book and page count. Most picture books are going to be 32, 40 pages long. The page counts go in increments of eight. And that's because the way the books are printed, they're printed on large sheets that are then folded and cut. If you imagine this being cut and then you cut the top, then you have 12345678 pages on it. Then each one of these groupings would be called a signature. When we first look at a book, first of all, most hardcover books will have what's called a jacket. Sometimes it's the same as your book cover, and sometimes it's different. And we have a hard cover, sometimes they're soft, but in general, books come out as hard covers. First, this would be the cover, and then we have back cover. When you open the book, what we usually get are what's called the end pages. Then after the end pages, we usually have a copyright page, and then we have a title page. We actually have that inside or the meat of the book, the text of the book. Then when we get towards the end, we'll have the end pages again and then we'll have the back cover. And sometimes there's changes to these pages. Like the copyright page might be actually like one of the last pages of the book, so there's a little bit of finagling. But if you stick to the regular template, if you want to pitch a book to a publisher having the end pages and then the copyright page and then the title page and then starting your story. That's kind of a sure fire safe way of pitching a book to a publisher. And then at a later point, if an editor thinks that, you know, some things need to be switched around or whatever, then they might make the decision that maybe will include the copyright page at the end, for example. All right, but just because we have 32 pages in a book doesn't mean that you divide your text for 32 pages. Let's look at how this book is put together. If we look at the spine over here, you can see we have the cover and then there is where all the pages are attached. Actually, this first page from the signature is glued down. This book is called a self ended book because the signature itself is glued on, glued onto the hardboard of the book. If we look at a schematic, so if you look at this schematic for a 40 page picture book template that is self ended, you'll notice that the first page is the part that's actually glued down to the hard cover of the book. And then when you open it, you have the two end pages. And then you'll have the actual pages of the book, the copyright title, and where the story starts. If we look at a separate ended book, sometimes there's an extra sheet of paper that's glued down. And then the signature or the actual, like the pages of the book are glued down to that book. How these first two pages are glued down at the bottom over here, This blue paper stock is different than the actual signatures and the paper stock of the book. These books are, in general, a little bit more expensive to create. The end pages are usually either colored or they might be printed with one or two different colors, but they're usually pretty plain. But the benefit of this one, it gives you more pages to work with. Your book, actually your page one is over here. And then page 2345, this is where the story starts. So it's pretty easy to tell if it's a separate ended or a self ended. Two big differences are that with the separate ended books, you will get limited printing on your end pages. But you get more leverage. You get more inside pages of the book. And then when you have the self ended book, your end pages can be printed in full color, but then you have a few pages less on the inside. So in general, I feel like I see more of the self ended books on the market. And so when I'm working on my own dummies, I usually set my page count to a self ended, either 32 or 40 page book. When you're choosing page count from talking to different editors and art directors, the general consensus is that they would like to see your books formatted to the 32 or the 40 page books. If for some reason you can't do that and your book ends up being a few pages over or a few pages under. It's not a deal breaker for an editor to acquire a book, but they definitely know that. Then it will be their job to help you edit it, either up or down, to fit one of those page counts. So it just looks professional if we are able to create our dummies so that they're the correct page count when we submit them to the publishers. All right, now that we know what parts of the book book are and what page count to use, let's look at how to get our story to fit onto those pages. 4. Pace Your Story: All right, now that we know how books are book put together, let's dive into our project. But before we can illustrate a book, we need a manuscript or text to illustrate. And so you can use Henny Penny, which I provided the manuscript for as part of this class. You can look at it, look for it in the download section, or you can use whatever story that you want. Doesn't matter which one you choose. So the first thing to begin is to read the story a few times. I know there's been more than once when I read a story for the first time that I didn't quite understand it or get the nuances of it. And so it's important to read it kind of slowly and read it a few times and kind of make mental notes of what you're thinking about illustrating or what kind of word pictures come to mind as you're reading it. And since we're using the folk tale, you are free to change the characters. Maybe it's not a chicken, maybe it's a, a squirrel, or maybe it's rhinoceros, or maybe it's a giraffe. I don't know. You can make them into different characters. You can change the names, You can make the story shorter if you want, and that's the great part. And especially if you take a folk story that's been done many times, if you want to make it your own and, you know, do kind of a fractured fairy tale or put it into a different time or a different setting, then that book becomes something that you could actually pitch to a publisher because it becomes a different story or it becomes your own version of that story. I recommend that you think about doing that too if you feel adventurous. All right, then as using one of these templates as a guide. So we have 32 or 40 page, we are going to use one of these as a guide to start pagenating the text for the spreads in general, you want to try to spread it out so that each spread of the book has roughly the same amount of text on it. There might be some places where it varies, like if there's a pause in the book, like a big emotion, you might have no words or only a few words on that page to make it easy for you, I've actually included your pages and spreads over here. For a 40 page picture book, you get 16 spreads and 32 pages to tell your story. But out of those, you lose two pages. Then you get about 15 spreads to tell your story. A lot of times I like to work on 40 page books, but if you want to do an easier version at first and get your feet wet, you might want to try the 32 page book where you'll end up having 11 spreads to work on. If you're working on paper, I often print out the text to keep it on hand. Or if you're working digitally, I copy and paste my text into my thumbnail document and then or have it printed out next to me so that I can reference it easily. If I'm going to do a 32 page picture book and I'm going to have 11 spreads. I'm going to start looking at my text and start figuring out how can I do 11 spreads from this right now. The way that it's just the way that it's paragraph, it's 12345678. We have eight that will give us the three more to work with. A few of these we might want to split up. Now would be a good time to make sure you read the whole thing and we have a couple of pieces that are really long. Maybe those are the ones that we're going to split up. Or in the beginning, because we're setting the story up. Maybe we want to split some of these pieces up so that we can set up our story in the beginning. And then because it's repeating the same s over again, then it's easier to, I could maybe cut down the word count on some of these other paragraphs to make it easier to fit, less text per spread. Once you have your story pasted out to 12, 16 segments, we can kind of work our way to the next step, which is to decide of the format of our book, whether we want it vertical or horizontal. 5. Book Size & Format: Before we start on our thumbnails, we obviously need to figure out if we're going to be doing a vertical or horizontal book so we know what size to create our dummy end. The exact inch measurement isn't something that you should get stuck on. Because if you ever do end up selling your book, then the publisher will decide what size they want to print it on. But I'll give you some basic guidelines on what sizes in general publishers work with. Your book can be either vertical, something like this. It can be horizontal something like this. Or then it can be square, like this one. When deciding about what format to pick, think about your story. How do you see your book reading out? Now, if you have trouble envisioning your book format, a good idea would be to visit a library or a bookstore and browse through some other books that have a similar feel to them. In the case of our folk story, Penny, you could look up other books of folk stories or you could look up character based stories. All right, so here are some general guidelines of like the orientation for your book. So if we're talking about vertical books, they are a very traditional format of the way that books are made. They fit really easily into bookshelves. They fit neatly into book displays. They are economical to produce because of the way that the pages are printed and bound on a sheet. And they're a great format for buildings, characters, and stories where the visuals are kind of in a vertical format in general. And the second format is horizontal books or landscape books. And those books are great if you have books that rely heavily on illustrations where there's landscapes or like expansive views of locations. It's great for if it's like a journey where a character, you're moving a character through a journey, that format works well for those kinds of stories too. Then the third is a square format, obviously that's in between both when you think about it, obviously when it's a square, it's a square. But then when you open it, then you can get expansive views. Personally, I really like square picture books and I feel like they offer benefits of both. One thing that I would recommend against is either in the vertical or the horizontal format, I would avoid going very far from like the general or sizes of books. So if you have a book that's really, really tall or really, really wide, then they become difficult to shelve, they become difficult to display. If you think about a library or a bookstore where they have books facing out. If you just have a really odd format for a book, then it's really hard to display that book and to sell that book. If you're just starting out and you're trying to figure things out, my recommendation is to stay at the same size as most of the other books at the library bookstore are. And as I said, the size of the book dummy is not super important because if you end up submitting to a publisher, the publisher will be the person you know, the people who decide the size. If you are self publishing, then I would recommend that you go onto the platform that you are self publishing on and look at what the sizes that they offer, look at the sizes before you start working on your dummy so that you know what sizes they offer so that you can create it perfectly to whatever size they have available. So some of the sizes that are normal are we have eight by ten or 8.5 by 11. So kind of normal letter size, sheet picture, frame size pieces on either vertical or horizontal. Or it could be a little bit smaller, like seven by nine. And then for the square format, it's not super crazy anywhere. If it's like let's say 8-2 by ten inch square, you should be fine if you don't know if you're really more advanced and you're working on your own story and you're working on your dummy. You could be working on it as a ten by ten. And that's probably about the biggest that your square book would be published as, because you're doing it as sketches, you can always zoom it up big later. All right, now that we have the story and we have all the technical, nitty gritty stuff figured out, let's jump into the super fun part and start working on thumbnailing our story. In the next video, I'll see you there. 6. Thumbnailing: Oh, all right. This is my favorite part of creating a picture book. So the thumbline part, I love this part the best because I can get really creative and it's like you get a bird's eye view of your whole book all at once. And you get to figure out really fun page turns and how you're going to surprise people, you know, the people who are reading your book. Or how you're going to build up anticipation and how all the different pages flow from one to another. And for me, it's just the most creative part. And the most fun part is just coming up with all the different ideas of what I can do, what you can do with the book. And so, you know, it kind of feel kind of daunting, like, oh my gosh, I don't even know if I can do a whole book, but you know, you don't have to draw anything really detailed. Like you're just kind of putting ideas down and kind of thinking in your head how different layouts would work. And so don't stress out about it too much. And you can always go back. You know, your thumbnails are going to be teeny tiny. You know, you can try ten different thumbnails for a spread. And, you know, it doesn't take you long to draw little shapes on a little square. And so don't stress out about it, you know, just let your imagination flow, do some fun research, look at different layouts, different ideas, and let's get down to it. So let's get our ipads out, or your paper and your pencils out, and let's get to work here. I've edited some of this text over here. Each spread of your book is going to have its own little set of text. And a lot of times I'll either have this printed out or I can copy this. And then I can come over here and then paste it over here. Now I just have it for reference over here, and I can just move it off to the side somewhere. So, for example, the beginning of our story reads, One day Henny Penny was picking up corn in the corn yard when whack something hit her upon the head. Goodness gracious me, said Henny Penny, the sky is going to fall. I must go and tell the King. We have the main event of Henny Penny being whacked in the head by an acorn. Then we have the choice of choosing which moment to illustrate that event. You can think of this event as like a film strip or like a little piece of a cartoon, and you need to pick the best stale shot of it. You have the moment before the acorn hits says it's falling down on the head. You have the moment when the acorn hits and then the moment after the acorn hits. And you'll have different expressions and different feelings for all those different moments. And so there's no right answer to which moment to pick is the right one. But you can make some little thumbnails or think in your head, which moment might be the right one for this part of the story. Are you trying to build anticipation or a surprise for an upcoming page? Or what feeling do you want to convey? On the spread you can think of the emotional impact that you want to have on the reader and how the story continues on the next page, over here as we're thinking. Let's try to illustrate the moment right before Penny. Penny is struck on the head. Maybe we can do two illustrations, or one. Maybe she's picking up corn and she's over here. And so this is one way to illustrate this. But then now that we've picked our moment that we want to illustrate, then we also want to think about the best camera angle you can think about. Do you want to, do you want to have this really close up? You can think if you want to have this really close up, maybe we want to crop it so that if we crop it too close up for this one, then we're not going to see the acorn. And maybe another option could be to crop it really far. And then we could actually illustrate a lot of the background over here. You can also think about, if you want to illustrate it from the top, maybe we could have Henny Penny Seen from above. If this is her head and here's your feet, whatever and then maybe the acorns coming. I don't know if you wanted to illustrate it from below, from like a worm's eye view. Maybe here's the corn and then Henny Penny's over here trying to pick it up. And then we'll see the acorn. We'll see the acorn. Maybe it's going to be really small because it's farther away as it's coming towards the head. You can think about the different camera angles close up, up, down, far away. You could think of looking at it from behind, looking at it from profile, looking at it from the front. Think about turn your camera. You turn things in your mind and think about what would be the best way to illustrate things. In the context of your book. If I'm thinking this is my first page in my book, over here I've had the copyright. Title. Or a copyright and I'll have the title page. So this will say Henny Penny, for example, in my name over here. I don't know. Maybe I'll have a picture of Henny Penny walking over here or something. Maybe she's carrying a basket. I don't know. Then I don't know. We could do maybe acorns or whatever other fun things. Maybe there could be a acorn tree over here. So just thinking, maybe for my opening spread, I want to do an establishing shot. A lot of times in the beginning of your story you want to do one shot that's a little bit further away. You're starting to establish your story. I could either include some of these elements over here or I can do that on my first page. Maybe there's going to be a barn or maybe a barnyard. I don't know if we want to show other characters over here. Maybe there's going to be the tree where the acorns coming from. Oh, it was in the hay field, so I don't know. Maybe we're showing some corn and then maybe the farm is going to be further out on a hill. We're showing something similar to this that we have, like this little farm yard going, maybe there's a tractor over here or something, then we're in our cornfield. As we're looking over here, maybe that could be like our first thumbnail. And then lastly, as you're thinking about your thumbnails, remember that books are read from left to right and from up to down. And think about how you are moving your reader's line of sight through your composition. A lot of times we have action moving from left to right. A lot of times it might be something from one picture to another. So for example, in my thumbnails that I've been working on a different book, I have this series of where there's going to be a rainstorm and there's this theme of this water. So these are my thumbnails for that book. And so there's going to be a picture of a turtle going into water. And so we have this kind of movement that our characters are walking this way over here. We have this movement that starts kind of from the bottom and it grows up. And then it goes, there's a river. And so it moves with the river. And then there's going to be a rainstorm. And so you're moving. I'm trying to move my readers eyes. End this story kind of in this wavy way, way, in the way that you could think water moving. And then when I move to a different subject matter in the book, then I'm changing my compositions to something else. So as I said, thumbnailing is a great way to think of your book as a whole. And in general, you don't want to use the same type of illustration through the whole book because it's going to be boring to read. You want to vary the illustrations up, so you might want to have a full spread illustration. Then there may be some vignettes, maybe a single page illustration, as you're working on your thumbnails. Be mindful of how much text you have going per page and then leave room for that text. With this much text going on over here, I might want to put that, leave kind of a space where the corn is kind of a light color. And I have my text over there. Or I might want to make my barn really tiny over here in the background and then have the sky area to include my text in over here. You just always want to make sure that you know how much text is going on a spread. So you know, if you have multiple illustrations, if you want to just add text in between or you want to have text under or however it might want to be, Just be mindful of leaving that room for that text. Once I'm done with adding all my different spreads and figuring everything out, I go into my settings and then I share this as an image, what do you call it? Onto my tablet. So I'm going to save it as an image and then export it. All right. As I'm working on a few more spreads for this book to repeat, here are some things that you can keep in mind while you're working on your thumbnails. So think about which moment and emotion you're illustrating. Think about the viewpoint. Think about your action lines, different kinds of layouts, variety of layouts, and leaving room for your text. You might be feeling a bit stuck for some of the spreads in this book, which is why I compiled a list of different types of illustrations for you in the next video. And I hope that you can use those as an inspiration for when you're working on your thumbnails. 7. Layouts & Page Turns, Vol 1: I wanted to make this video for you as an extra resource, we're going to look at different layouts for books, for full spreads or half pages or vignettes and spots. The terminology isn't super important at this point, but I just wanted you to be aware of all the different ways that you can lay out a page or a spread. And then maybe take some inspiration from some of the books that we're going to be looking at. The list for all the authors and illustrators that I'm going to be featuring in this video is going to be in the class handout if you want to look at any of those people more closely. So let's look at some of these books. The first illustration that I wanted to show you are full bleed illustrations. And what full bleed means is that the illustration goes off the page in all different directions. When you're drawing your illustration, you're actually drawing your illustration a little bit larger than your page. And then it gets put into the template for the book template. And then a little bit of it gets cut off. Then we have a river by Mark Martin. This book is a journey, you'll see through the whole book full spreads, how the river runs through. And there's a little girl in a boat. In all these compositions, she goes on a fun journey. In this book, these are all full spread illustrations to tell a journey. This is one of my books, Kitty and at Bent Out of Shape, I use spreads in pretty, almost the whole book. They change from spread to spread, and some of them are more paired down with the backgrounds than the other. Then this is another one, little seasons, spring seeds, I like to have a lot of white area in my books, you'll see a lot of my skies are white, it's full bleeds. But you could almost think that this was a spot illustration because it's almost white in the background. Then we have Island born by Diaz and illustrated by Leo Espinoza. Here I want to just show the full bleed illustrations Can also just a single page here, it's a single page, it bleeds off on all four sides. Then this book also has this really great spread that I wanted to share the characters two times. This is them in the current day. The story is telling how they're imagining the hurricane, or the storm blew through their island. You'll see this whole full spread going through over here with a fun placement of the text. Then I wanted to share My Baba's Garden by Jordan Scott and Sydney Smith. Here, there's a spread illustration as well. There's lots of full spreads. Is a single page and then there's also a box illustration that is cropped from a larger painting. All right. Those are your most commonly seen options, Full beds, full bleed spreads that you can do either a full spread or single pages. Then I wanted to show a variation on those. This is the Rock from the Sky from John Klassen and in a lot of his books you'll see where you can have full bleed illustration, but it's cut off at some point to make room for a text. Sometimes the text is on the top. I don't know if this book has it on the bottom. Sometimes he'll put it on the bottom. Sometimes it can be a panel on the side, but you can also make room for your text in different ways. Then this is a similar spread. If you go down to the woods today, poems by Rachel Percy and illustrated by Freya Harts, we have almost a spread illustration and then it's also cut off. Then there's a text over here, there's a poem, and then things defined and there's some little illustrated elements on this side too. All the spreads are similar, but they're just broken off. They're spreads, but then they have these little vignettes for the text instead of the page of text with vignettes for the pictures since we talked about that box illustration in the Baba's garden. This is curious story of Edward Nonsense by Laurie Mortensen and illustrated by Chloe Bristol in the style of Edward Gory's illustrations in his books. Laurie has also done some boxed illustrations over here and then the text is shown on the side. So that's another way. But she has many different kinds of illustration, so there's full page vignettes, things mixed together in this book. All right, so let's talk about some spots and vignettes. When I think about vignettes, it's in an old word for me. And I think about those Victorian portraits or old time portraits where you'll have a person and then they're in an oval picture frame or framed in some way. Vignettes are kind of just that. They are usually, they're not full bleed, they stop. But a lot of times their edges will be kind of blurred out or they're not super regular. This is Backyard Fairies by Phoebe Wall, and she's got the whole book is these vignettes. Then here's the what ifs, and these ones are circular and you can have one per page. You can have multiples per page. Then, once upon a unicorn's horned by Beatrice Blue. And she has a couple of vignettes over here. I just wanted to show this full page illustration real quick before we go to the next one. You can see it's the same illustrated multiple times, but it's a passing of time. And the text says, then he shook his soft fur and fluttered his sparkly tail. It's showing us how he's fluttering his tail. And it's given us this sense of movement by putting the character on the page multiple times. Then there's spots which are usually more of a fleet free floating motif with no background. But in all honesty, a lot of times I'll hear the words vignettes and spots being used, those two words used interchangeably in book illustrations. Here's one where we have three illustrations on a page and you can see it's telling a passing of time. These little spots or vignettes are really great for that, for showing us a passing of time. Then this is Mother Bruce by Ryan Higgins. So you can see on this spread, there's four different spots and some of them are overlaid on top of each other, and then this is, Grown ups, never do that. By David Kale and Benjamin Shad. He's put a whole bunch of different illustrations onto this spread, just showing crazy things that adults do. The text only says they're never clumsy. And then it shows all these things where adults are clumsy. Then lastly, I have a leaf thief, and it's got three illustrations on it. And I just thought this was fun because you can see how the text is also laid interestingly in there. The text says, try to relax, Breathe in and out. Just relax then see, we have the second page that has no text, the last word. And then we see the lights on at the end of the night as he's having a hard time relaxing. It's a fun placement of the illustrations next to each other to tell the story of what the text is saying. Then for these next two pages, I wanted to talk about what I feel is like meandering illustrations. And a lot of times they will have white areas and the edges are raggedy. And I like the way where there's that play between the illustration itself and then the white space around it. Matthews. In the gold leaf written by Kristen Hall, illustrated by Matthew Forsyth. He has several spreads like this in this book where it just flows really nicely from one spread to another. But then you have these empty areas where you can put text. You can see he's got that almost a full bleed with the text on the bottom. And then here's just another one where he's left this effect of the raggedy edge on the bottom. Then here's just another version of it where we've got the shadow of a Christmas tree and all the action happening within that shadow. And then that leaves space for our text on the outside. All right, and then last we have this story, Mary Poppins by PL. Travers, illustrated by Genevieve Goodbout. And she has kind of a different variation of this. And so on this spread, we'll see, you know, kind of a lot of the illustration on the bottom, text on the top. But then, I love the way as she's pulling these things out, instead of just showing them on the floor or showing them on the table, we see them kind of floating through the air, as Mary Poppins is kind of magical. And then here's just a different spread from later on in the book where, you know, everybody, Uncle Albert is up in the air. And then and Jane and Michael start laughing. And we have everybody kind of floating, floating up in the air. So that's kind of a fun spread too. All right. The next thing I wanted to look at really quickly was just using several spreads to kind of build up a story. So in this first book, it's just The Octenauts and the Growing Goldfish by Momi. In this one we have three, four illustration with a little spot over here on the side text on the side, some over here. In this one the river seemed to disappear in the sky. This is one of my kids favorite books. Then it was waterfall. Then you turn it up and then we always yell, waterfall. And then a little bit of text on the bottom. Then we have this sequential imaging actually. And Bear came along by Lewin Fam. She has a similar thing we're building up. There's bear who's floating on the river and you'll see how she's using different camera angles. We're far away, We're getting closer, and we're getting closer. They run into a duck, and then the duck is on their pile. Now you can see we're building up tension over here with illustration, no text on this page. Then we get a really far away shot. Wow. And then they all fall down the waterfall. And you can see how in a similar way as they're tumbling down, the text has been placed on the page too. And then they all end up having a good time and floating down together in case you can't tell yet. I absolutely love picture books. We looked at a lot of books already and I wanted to take a break at this point. If you want, there's a volume two of where we look at several more picture books and look at really interesting page turns and building up tension in your story. Or if you would rather just go to the library and do some of your own research and find your books that you are drawn to, then I encourage you to do that. And then skip on to the next video after video eight, which is all about sketching and setting up your file and procreate. 8. Layouts & Thumbnails, Vol 2 : Welcome to volume two of Layouts and Page Turns. We're going to look at a few more interesting books that I just could not help but share with you. And I hope you enjoy a couple more as we look at interesting layouts, or how to build fund tension, or some other interesting ways to solve issues with your storytelling. And then I wanted to look at Nosey Knight by Mac Barnett and Brian Biggs. The way that this story, it's really interesting the way that Brian Biggs figured it out. It's basically a story that happens in a tall house and you're going like one floor at a time. A kid was sleeping and then he woke up on the bottom floor and he's wondering what's going la, la, la, above my head. And you can see this break on the top. Then we see the guy, and man is singing opera above my head. And then it keeps moving up. What's going above my head? A baby is cooling above my head, Ma, in every spread. We're moving like an elevator, Seeing every single floor and the characters on each floor. If you notice, he's also used different fonts. I don't know if he's hand lettered everything, but you can see that with the Cowboys, it's a Western font. Then there's a girl, there's the Crow saying. Then there's raw, raw, and cheerleaders are cheering. And then there's Chacha, which is a different. Fawn, blah, blah, blah. It's just a fun way to solve visually the book where we're moving up then I wanted to do Grab That Rabbit by Polly Faber and Brioni Maysmith. This one is just the fun book because Brioni Maysmith, she's using a lot of different angles over here. This is from like rabbit's point of view. We've got this bush that we're looking into the sun with the gardener and I love it with the little pieces coming out. Then we get to a spread. We have a full spread. Then we get to this page where the hawk comes down. We're looking at it from below. We're looking at it from below. Then we're looking at it from above and looking down at the bunny. There's just some really fun illustrations in here and the ladies stumping inside. And you can see the light coming through the doorway over here. It says Penelope Rex was very surprised to find out that all of our classmates were up until now, we've just been seeing these dinosaurs in this book and all of the dinosaurs were. And it's leaving us a cliff hanger. So we need to turn the page then it's children and you'll see this full spread of the kids and Penelope Rex over there. If you look at this illustration, see how Ryan, this is a book by Ryan Higgins. How everything in the classroom is just a single red color. And so that way it's easy for us to spot the children and the teacher in the classroom. So he's using color to direct our eye through this illustration. Over here we have a white background, is Penelope is not quite sure. Walter looking at him and then Walter the goldfish stares back and licks his lips. And so we have this menacing background. So we're going from white background to like the moment of ah with Penelope with a red background and then he runs off. Dinosaurs are delicious in the end. And then I wanted to look, this is Wordy Birdie, written by Tammy Sauer, illustrated by Dave Matrem. Over here. Every spread in this book is really busy because all the characters have their little speech bubbles. And then there's some text around. But as you can see, it's really busy. And everybody's trying to tell Wordy Birdie to walk around. And then we get to this spread, you'll see there's all this text. And then it just stops and we have the big eyes and the dark in the scary. We get to this moment of wondering, oh my gosh, what's going on? And then we get the bear word. Birdie just goes, oh, and then it goes on from there. And then we have collecting cats by Lorena Scobeat. For this one. I love the way that she builds up the tension in this one too. So you want to keep turning the pages and reading to find out what happens. So we start with one cheese and it's got a little mouse, and then there's more mice, and then there's more mice, and then all of a sudden you get cats. And then you get lots of cats. Then after you get all kinds of cats, and then, oh my goodness, a big cat. And then the story changes. It's just a really great way to keep your readers turning pages and wondering what's happening on the next Bread metal. If you're looking for interesting layouts, Sophie Blackhaw has a lot of really great ones to look out for. Finding Winnie is another one that won the caldicott that has great layouts in it. If you think about this book about a lighthouse that's very long and skinny. And you'll notice this book is also very long and skinny. There's some really interesting, we have a view that's from above. And then we have this really fun cut out of the lighthouse. And then if you think about the bottom of a lighthouse is circular. She uses a lot of these circular vignettes in her illustrations, and most of them are not on a white background. They have some picture or illustration or something underneath them. I just wanted to share a few. For example, on this Fred, we have that circular illustration and it shows the passing of time as the wife is going into labor. Some really fun as we imagine her running down the stairs and the way that the text is laid out. Over here we have another illustration. It straight down, we're looking at the circle. Our viewpoint is out this way. But then see how things are backwards. Going down, we have another illustration with a little vignette on the top. Some really strong illustration, there's little messages and then our vignettes on the top. But the vignettes are cut out, bleeding off to the sides. Some fun layouts in that one. Then lastly, I wanted to talk about the passing of time and graphic novel type paneling in picture books, and these are just a few examples of that. This is mighty in by Melissa Castillon over here. She's using these four panels and it's actually just in one scene, but we have the same characters in it. Over here, there's an owl that grabs her over here. We see them flying. It may be a little bit smaller. Over here, they're flying closer to the house. And over here he's dropping her off. So it's kind of one scene that's broken down with the characters shown in it multiple times. And this could either, you could also show this where there's no lines and you would just show. But for the reader, it sometimes makes it easier if you are showing that. And another thing that I just wanted to show from her book really quick, that I love what she does is she'll do, she'll do these full spread illustrations. And I love this spread, how they contrast between each other. And so we have this full bleed illustration on this side and then how it frames the text in the middle. And then over here it's the other. This is her coming home and how brave she was. And now this is them having their dinner. Now all the characters are still framing. The illustration is in the middle of the page, and then we have the text in the middle of the page. I love the contrast between these two pages, then wills in the pigeon books, this is pigeon finds a hot dog. In all of his books, he usually has the spread where pigeon gets angry. And then he has all these lines and they're shown in all these different little squares. It, as he goes through all these different emotions and they're fun to read with the kids. Then this is super pop and Wiz Kid Potty Power by Eunice Moyle and Sabrina Oil. This book, there's a, these small little panels as you'll see. Multiple panels to just show, like, the different parts of the text for that page, I wanted to show those. Then lastly, for Colettes Lost Pet by Isabelle Arsenault, she uses a lot of this paneling. They could be spot illustrations, but the way that they're laid out close to each other and they all line up with each other, it's almost more like a graphic novel paneling over here, the way that she's got it, there's three over here. And then I just wanted to show, I thought this page was really fun in the way that she just, kids are chiming in trying to find the parakeet and it's just their heads with their little speech bubbles as they're all chiming in. You can, you can feel the scene in your head. She's sad and all these kids are coming up to her and then trying to help her out. And they're asking her these questions. Hopefully some of the books that we looked at will be lots of inspiration. What I always recommend is going to the library and borrowing a bunch of books. And just reading a bunch of books and being exposed to a lot of different kinds of illustrations. If you look at all these books that we saw today, they're all illustrated with different media in different styles. Some are very graphic, some are more wispy, some are painterly, some are traditional, some are cartoony. You know, you can find inspiration for both style and for all the different layout issues or problems that you might be having in your own book. All right, now that we've thumbnailed, hopefully your whole book out, let's move on to taking those thumbnails and sketching them larger. And I will also show you how I set up my dummy files in procreate. 9. Sketching and File Setup: Let's set up our dummy pages and procreate. And I've decided I'm going to do an eight by ten book. And when I work on book dummies, I like to work on spreads instead of individual pages. That way if I'm working on an actual spread, I'll be able to get my drawing to flow from one side to the other instead of having to work on individual pages and then trying to connect them. To set this up, I'm going to start a new canvas. And then if I'm doing a full spread, if I'm doing full bleeds, I usually add a quarter of an inch all the way around my canvas. If it's an eight by ten, then I would do 10.5 tall, make sure I have inches selected. And then ten, a two tall. And then for the width, it would be two times eight. Then I would add the quarter of an inch around, so it would be 16.5 for my width. Then I'm going to have it at 300 DPA. And then I'm going to hit Create. Now this would be one spread for my book. Once I have that set up, I usually go to my canvas. I go to my drawing guide. Edit, Drawing Guide. And then I change my grid size to something a little bit bigger just so that I can get my middle line. I make sure that I'm working on a layer. I have my pencil selected, and from there I'm going to draw a line. And then I'm going to tap, which makes the line straight up and down. Actually, a lot of times I like to make my margins and gutters just a different color, so it's easier to see, to undo. You just tap with two fingers. I'm going to start in my middle line, draw it down, tap and hold. That's going to be my gutter. That's where the pages go on top of each other. And then most of the time, I like to add lines around the edges just to remind me to stay out of the margins. I'm not super concerned if they're a quarter of an inch or not. It's just for my brain to remind me that I just don't draw anything in those areas. And then when I'm done with those, I go back to my actions panel and I turn the drawing guides off because they're usually a little bit just distracting for me. All right, this is going to be my gutter. I usually name this something like gutter in general. I try to keep this on top, but you've got to make sure that you don't draw on it. I usually lock this layer just to make sure that I don't do my drawings on it, so I can just keep everything separate. Then I'm going to start another layer. Then what I do is I'm going to add when we were working on thumbnails, I saved that file and I'm going to insert a photo. I'm going to insert my thumbnail photos. I'm just going to, if you've illustrated everything, then I leave it so that I can see on my pages like this. I just leave this on my page like this. It's on a separate layer over here. I'll add another layer. This was our 32 page template. And so we have, and so when I go back to my gallery, I'm going to duplicate this 16 times. All right? And then from here I label my different panels. And so my first one is always going to be front and pages. And so now I've gotten everything labeled. Then I'm not going to worry about my end pages first. I'm not going to worry about my copyright and title pages. We'll start over here where our story actually starts. The reason why I always paste my thumbnails on the top is I usually like to blow up my sketches over here. That just makes it easier for me to start working on my illustration. I usually don't do all of them at once, but I'll just do another one. Just so you can see now I would be on page eight and nine. I always bring my capacity down and then bring my gutter up to the top, so that gives me make sure that I get everything where I need them to be. I'm working on my illustration, You'll see we have the gutter over here. A good rule of thumb is you can try to keep everything within about an inch, half an inch, away from the gutter. We don't want our character in the middle with their head in the middle or part of their body in the middle. We, in general, want to have things on both sides and then leave the gutter alone, or put some interesting things into it. Then when you start sketching, if I'm feeling a little lost if I haven't figured out what my character design is going to be. A lot of times I will take a little bit of extra time and I will just work on my characters on a different sheet. I might work on some chicken sketches. Over here you can see these were some of the sketches that I did for Mass si the Nome for one of my mass and tweet books. These were right in the beginning and I was trying to figure out what does his face look from the side. Thinking about how I already have him posed in the book for all the different pages. And this was just me trying to try different poses for him and see which way it works. But what I really find is, even when I do sketches like this and I figure stuff out, a lot of times once I actually start working on the dummy, I really figure out those last couple of kinks on how my character is going to look. And sometimes that means that I have to go back and revise my illustrations. But I feel like that, at least for me, that's part of the process. But sometimes you might want something as a reference. So let's say this is going to be my Henny Penny. And I want to make sure that I'm going to be drawing her consistently in my book. What I might do sometimes is I might take my sketches and the ones that I like the most I might crop so I don't have extra room around it. And then I'll save this then when I come back to my sketching over here, if I'm working on my sketches and I want to make sure that I'm consistently drawing my character, then I might go to my canvas and then hit Reference and then import my drawing over here. This is going to be my sketch layer. I'm going to lock this one to you. Then I'm actually going to start working on my sketch here. We have the corn. My sketching is always loose in the beginning. Maybe I want to make it so that this is framing Henny Penny over here. I usually sketch several different times. I'll do just a very loose sketch, but that's a little bit more detailed than what I already had, just refining my initial idea a little bit. I'm just trying to think about elements that can add interest into my piece and give us a sense of place and setting if we wanted to. You could also think, since we have these other characters, you could also maybe show the other characters farther away if you wanted. A lot of times I will actually, I forgot to do it this time. But once I start actually getting to my end or more refined sketches, I usually always do my characters on a different layer. So I just did my select tool, I dragged a line around it and then I three fingers swiped and I'm going to cut and paste this. Now I have penny, Penny on its own little layer over there. Then that way if I need to resize characters or move them around, then it's easier for me to move them around instead of having to redraw. Then once I get more of my sketch, I take that other layer out from behind, over there. Just so that I can see what I'm working on. If I'm thinking about time of day, maybe this is middle of the day so we could have a sun over here, maybe. Well, we know we're going to have our text over here, so I'm going to just mark that down for me so I don't draw stuff over here. Make sure I leave this clear. It's fairly loose in the beginning and I might be working on things And then a lot of times I'll have my characters on that different layer, like I said. And then, do I want to have the character smaller? Do I want to have the character bigger? If this is dropping from here, I got to make sure it's going to drop on her head. If I have her here, then it's going to hit her in the neck. Another thing that I try to be careful about when I'm drawing is tangents or making things kind of run into each other. Right here, the henny Penny's head is kind of at the same edge as this board. And so I, it might be that maybe I move that board a little bit over. Then another thing you got to decide, am I doing a human sized barn or is this a animal size barn? The animals, the creatures who live over here and everything is sized to them. I was thinking it would be funny. Henny, Penny and everybody else, if they actually had more personalities, they would all have professions and personalities and that might make a fun story. I've given everybody, the rooster is going to be chopping wood and then the. One of the other characters would be chopping watermelons. So they're all doing things that are maybe a little bit dangerous. My thing was folk tales can oftentimes be a little gory or lit off for today's readers, Like in this story, their heads get chopped off and then the fox tosses them on the shoulder. It's a good idea to maybe think about that. The way that I played it out over here was that they all have knives or something tucked under their wings when they go into the cave. We have a dark scene with everybody's eyeballs and then the birds come back out. But we don't, I'm not showing anything happening, but it leaves it a little bit open, like in John Clauson's books, to interpretation on what happens in the book. You're welcome to make those changes. You're not drawing beheaded turkeys and roosters in your books. Okay. A lot of times, once I have my page sketched out or even before I start sketching things out, I will come over here to my text and I will copy what I have and then come to me or to my illustration and then add a text layer. I'm going to change my size to, let's say 14 regular done. Then I'm going to paste my text over here and then leave it over here. I actually already moved my clouds over a little bit to make room for the text. Now, this would be a great start for me. I usually do all my pages like this and then I look at them from this angle. Just when I can see all my layouts all together to see if I see some things that are not working or if I need to change something. And then once I have everything roughly sketches, sketched, then I would go back and maybe sketch things a little bit better. Or you don't need to have everything super detailed sketched. You want it to be about this where you're indicating what everything is on the page. But what I would want to do is just have it cleaned up a bit instead of going around over here and trying to erase little lines over here, Just trying to neaten things up. It's much easier for me. I usually just bring down my capacity, do another layer on top of it and then I'll do my final sketch layer on top of this to make it into the final form. I thought it would be helpful to share a few notes about character and dummy drawing dummies consistently. So I'll share my notes on those in the next video, and then we'll move forward to doing some final illustrations. 10. Character Consistency: I wanted to make a quick second little note on keeping your characters consistent. It's very important when you're drawing your dummy, that your character is drawn consistently through all the different spreads and pages of the book. I'll often save that character sheet onto a separate file and then use it for reference and keep it here on the side. Then I'll make some general notes, either in my head or on that paper, of things about my character in Masan Tweed. I'm obviously drawing two different characters. Some of the notes that I had in my mind when I was drawing these characters was that both of them have about the same size head. And it's the same shape of an oval, but for Tweed it was up and down, and then for Mass it was sideways. The length of the leg that was showing was a little bit shorter and a little bit longer. On Tweed, their boots were the same size for both of them. All right, so for mass, when I was treating, or both of them really kind of both of their shirts were kind of the size or shape of a trapezoid. And moss was a little bit more kind of straight up and down and short and stocky. And then Tweeds was more of a long and narrow one. And then, as far as comparing them to each other, when I would draw them next to each other, Massy's head was about at the same height as Tweeds shoulder. Whenever I was drawing them next to each other, even if I was drawing them sideways, I would imagine. If both of these characters stood up right now, would that be the length that they would be in every scene? When I drew them, I would make sure the same length if they were to be standing up next to each other. Those are just some of the things, not just think about shapes and relationships in a character themselves, but then also think about the relationships between the characters to each other. Then another thing you could think about, if they put their hands next to their side, where would their hand land? Would it be down here or would it be down here? Where would the sleeves go? That just helps you keep things a little bit more consistent as you're moving your characters through the pages. And then think about things and simple shapes and their shoes are basically just almost a square, a little bit of rectangle with a triangle on it. And then if they're facing you, then it would just, the triangle would be in the front. Then Massy's hat, it was very easy to think about. I would split his head in two and that would be the top of his hat. And then there would be an ear. And then I would just draw the hat would just go a little bit outside of that with a little thing that went past his ear. I would have all these little rules in my head when I would draw these characters that made them very easy to draw them consistently as I went along. Or oftentimes beginning illustrators myself included, will say that they can work in multiple styles, in all these different styles. But once you actually start working on a picture book and you're on a deadline and you have to create illustrations in a specific style, dozens of illustrations. You fall into an idiosyncratic way of drawing, like the way that your hand just works, the way that you're comfortable drawing backgrounds, the way that you're comfortable drawing characters. You might realize that you don't want to draw every single item in a room very detailed. That you want to do maybe a flatter style or a simpler style that works for picture books. This exercise is really great in figuring out what your style is as an illustrator and then trying to keep it consistent within a picture book. Once you have your illustrations worked out, maybe after your first or second round of sketching, you might want to take a week off from your project and just take a break, which helps you forget what you've done and then come back to it with fresh eyes. A lot of times I'll either ask somebody to read it for me or I will read it to my kid. That's a great way to test how your dummy works. Figure how the pacing goes. If something feels off, or if people aren't laughing at the right time, or they're not anticipating things or wanting to turn the pages or they get bored when they're reading it. It's just a great way to test what you've done if it works. And then you might need to go back and tweak some of your layouts or pages, or where the text is on the page to make things run smoothly through the whole book. After that, a trial run, you might have to do it again, but at this point, your dummy should be in really good shape, and there's only a couple of steps left. In the next video, we're going to look at picking out a few illustrations from your dummy and then finalizing them and then including them either in your portfolio or then in the dummy submission to a publisher or an agent. 11. Final Illustrations: We're almost done with our book at this point. We still are going to talk about pages and our copyright and title page real quick. And we'll pick our final illustrations and finish those up. All right, we're almost done with our dummy. Let's really quick discuss pages and our copyright and our title page of our template. And then we will pick our final illustrations and finish our dummies. And so the four year end pages, they can be a lot of different things. They can have some sort of a simple pattern on it. It's something that relates to the book or for like Si and Tweed. I wanted to include a map so that people have a sense of what kind of world I'm trying to build with it. With Kitty and cat opposites attract. I chose to do a scene that sets also the mood for my story. Then in Kitty and Cat, because it's a shape book, I'm using my end pages to actually show the shapes in my books. And fun thing between my front and my back end pages is that then the end pages have in all of those shapes, there's a lot of different things that you can do with your end pages. And you can go to the library and do some research if you're feeling stuck. But in some way, they just should relate to your story and enhance it. And then for our title in our copyright page, there's in general, a decent amount of text that needs to be laid out on this page. For example, in Kitty and cat bent out of shape. I have these little spot illustrations here that tell us a story of T is mad because he doesn't have his food and then he goes and he gets dirty. And then on the title page, we're showing the illustration of cat coming home with being all stinky with a rotten piece of fish and some flies. And then when our story starts, I've set up the story on my title and my copyright page for where I actually start. That's one way of doing it. Sometimes this page can be empty if you don't want to do anything for it. And sometimes your title page would just have a little spot illustration. It's up to you what you want to do with it when we're working on our dummy for this story, for the title pages. I was thinking because we have the acorn tree and maybe it might be fun to have some just an acorn tree up on the top or oak tree. Or maybe there could be a oak leaves or something related to our oak tree. Then our copyright information would be in the middle because it's a folk story. Decorative elements I feel like would go well then over here I thought I would, I could hand letter Henny Penny. Then it would probably have my name maybe right here. And then I thought it would be cute to show her as she's going. Maybe she's carrying, she's got her little basket that she's maybe carrying. This might be a cute little front page, or if it's a folk story, maybe I might want to do a cute little wreath of oak leaves with acorns. Or it could have the different characters. There could be a rooster over here, and then my ducky could be over here, and then maybe the foxes where over here. So you could think about different ways of how to illustrate your cover page and your copyright page, but just be aware that all those things might change once a book is purchased and the editor or agent might want to work on it. Oh, once you have everything sketched out and everything's looking nice and everything's reading and flowing smoothly, then in general, I pick about 345 tops, maybe six pages of illustrations that I will finish, do final illustrations for the book. In general, it's nice to have them together so that when somebody is reading the book, they get a nice sense of how things are working in general. I like to have the first two to three spreads worked out if, but if there is a page that's somewhere further down in your book that you just think it's just a dynamite, absolutely gorgeous spread that you want to illustrate. Then you could pick that as your piece to illustrate. Picking the illustrations out in the beginning and getting all this set up would then be a great way for you to export this PDF and then use it as part of your submissions. Now if you're more of a beginner illustrator and you want to use pieces for your portfolio, then I would. Then it doesn't matter if they're the first spreads or, you know, it doesn't matter which pages or spreads you pick. But what I would recommend is, since you're picking them all from the same story, that maybe one of the illustrations is going to be a foul full page spread. And then one of the illustrations that you're going to finish is going to be a single page spread. And then maybe the third one is going to be some vignettes or something like that. That way when an editor, or an agent, or an art director looks at your portfolio, they can look at it. And they can look at it and see that you're able to move your characters through different spaces. They're able to see that you're showing different expressions. And you are showing that you can do different types of illustrations nicely. Especially doing a really great job with spreads is important to show art directors if you want some help on how to work on final illustrations and Photoshop, I recommend this class that I have. You're ready on skill share, you can just go and perfectly the theme already is a chicken and a chick and I just go through how to work on different textures and drawing your characters and having the different layers that class might be helpful for you at this point if you are still new to procreate and how to draw digitally. Okay, so at this point you should have finished sketches for your whole dummy and a couple of finished illustrations. And then in the next video, let's see how to export our files out of procreate as a PDF. 12. File Exporting: Now we have all the pieces ready for our dummy. We have the sketches, and then we have all the final illustrations. Let's export our files as a PDF. So it can then be sent out to critique partners. Or if you want to go out on submissions, it can be sent to agents or publishers. And it'll look like a nice professional package to send out to export your files as a PDF. I would tap Select, then you have little circles over here. I would just tap on each one, each page that I want to include in my PDF. Then I would hit Share, and then you go to PDF. Then you choose the quality. In general, I do the good quality because I don't want huge, it's a huge file, then I can't e mail it to anybody or it takes just room up on my computer. I either usually do the good or the better, but even the good one seems to be okay, good. Then from there, you choose where you want to save it. As in general, I save it onto my file, onto my Google Drive, but you can also save it into my files over here over here. I always like to change my file name. Over here, I could write, hey, good guidelines would be to have Penny, you might also want to have your name on it. If you're sending it off to submission the most of the time, it's a good idea to also have the time and the date on it. Today is March 19. So I could do three 19 then. That way when I save it, I know what story it is. If I'm sending it off to my critique partners, they know who sent it, whose story it is, and then I'll have the date. If I make a revision on this later, then I'll know which is my new story and which is my older story. Then I just hit Save, my file is done. Then if I want to open, then when I come over here, I can open up my PDF and it's already, and so that's how you export your files. 13. Bonus: Paper to Digital PDF: This is a little bonus video for everybody who has been following along in this class. If you don't have an ipad and procreate, or you don't have access to Adobe Photoshop, which can be a pricey program to subscribe to if you are just traditional and you've been working on some with pencils and paper. This bonus module is for you on how to take those drawings that you have and then convert it into a digital PDF that you can then either print out or send as a digital copy to somebody. You might have pictures that you've drawn or you might have everything in a sketch book. What I recommend is just getting your phones. These days, phones have pretty great cameras in them. What I would recommend is just photograph all your pieces. Try to make sure they're as flat as possible so that the pages aren't curved like if they're in your notebook. Sometimes I'll actually cut the pages out so that I can photograph them flat or lay something on top of it to keep it flat. Then a little tidbit that I have for you. If you've been working on thin paper and you see lines poking from behind, over there from the other side of your sketchbook, what I recommend is just getting a piece of dark mat board or just a dark piece of it, can be construction paper, even if it's dark blue or something. And then just laying that behind your page and then having just that dark thing behind over here is going to keep those lines from showing up from the back side of your paper. So that's just a little tidbit, a little tip on how to try to get the best possible photos of, of your sketches. And then another important thing is just to try to have even lighting when you're holding your phone over there that you're not casting a big shadow in the middle of it. What I usually do is I'll either have two lights shining on it or a light shining from the front. So when I put my camera on the top, there's no shadow. Or then a great idea would be to just be next to a window, so that you're not in direct sunlight, but just right next to where the sunlight is usually, that's plenty of light for you to take photos. And then you're usually not casting shadows because sunlight is so strong. After you have things photographed, then what I would do is usually I just upload my photos to Google Drive or you can load or you can E mail them to yourself, whichever way possible. You just need to be able to get them onto your computer and then download them. Then let's jump onto the computer and then we'll look at Canva over there and how you can create a PDF in Canva. Okay. I've downloaded all my images onto my desktop. I've created a separate folder where I have put them all in. And I have a free account on Canva, so you don't need to pay for it. And so I'm going to go into creating a new design with a custom design. I'm going to be doing a square template today. Let's put eight by 8 " and then you can also do storybook. If I wanted to do this, I guess I can try that. I think the difference if you just make one or if you make the book format, it just shows it differently underneath over here. All right, then from here I'm going to upload my images and then upload files. And I've actually already uploaded, so I would highlight all my pieces and then open. But I've uploaded some of my sketches over here. What I usually do, this will be my first page. I always have my copyright page first just in case an agent is looking at. I'm hoping that everybody is going to view my books in the double page format. I usually include this in here. I might take this copyright out, I might even hold on, let me crop this extra stuff. A lot of times I might just add something to the effect, let's move this out of the way. I might put basically whatever I want the person who's reading this to know about this. I'm going to write nonfiction book. Then usually it's nice to have a word count. People know what to expect. Let's say my book is 450 words. I'll just usually put that on this page in the beginning so people know or if there's anything else that I want people to know then. We'll go back over here. And then this is the second half of this page. This doesn't have my name on it, so I want to make sure that I'm adding my name over here. Then I'll move it down this way, we'll make it bigger. Since I'm just trying to do it this fast, just to show you, you could play with different fonts over here, but I'm just doing playing. Then I would just keep adding pages and keep adding all my uploads so I could do multiple pages. Let's do my end pages for the, make sure I highlight the right one. I don't use Canva a whole lot, but it is very useful if you don't have access to Adobe Photoshop or an ipad with procreate, it does come pretty handy. I don't claim to be a whiz or anything like that, but I just know the basic functioning of how to get stuff done over here. I just want to make sure I've gotten everything going in pairs. I can also duplicate the page or duplicate my image, and then just move that over to the next one. That might be a faster way to go. All right, let's pretend that this is my whole book dummy over here. I've stuck all my sketches over here. If you have a piece over here and Canva will allow you to do a little bit of editing, but it's not as extensive as, it's not as extensive as what Photoshop or maybe procreate might offer. All right, let's say I'm going to bring in one of my sketches over here just so I can show a little bit how I would edit something that isn't so clean as what I've done and procreate. I'm going to drag this over here and I'll place it. It's not quite the same format, but we'll go pretty close. In general, remember the reason I was trying to say, photograph everything as square as you can because then you don't have to worry about cropping parts of your sketch off. But I'm just going to bring this to be big enough. As big as big is my page. Let's go with that. All right, now I would go to Edit Photo. Then I would probably bring, first thing, let's see, I want to probably up my contrast. Then I want to bring my shadow. It's just playing with these with my whites. Bring my brights up, but see if I bring it too far up, then I lose my sketches. It's a matter of adjusting these things. It might just be my highlights bringing my whites up and then going down over here and bringing my saturation all the way down so I can have gray scales or instead of that yellowish tone that I was having. Okay. So that might be in the best that I would get, but it would still probably work. Maybe I would have to need to crop it a little bit. I wouldn't want my thumb in it, but yeah, that's how I would edit my photo, at least to get it a little bit better than what it was. The key is if you don't have image editing software and you feel leery about downloading anything, then it's always nice if you can take your photographs as bright as you can and as evenly as you can. At this point, we are ready to it. I have all my pieces over here. I'm going to go up over here on the top and hit Share. And then I am going to go down to download. Since I want to download it over here, I'm going to change this into PDF. You can decide if you want print or standard. The standard is going to be a smaller file. One of the reasons that you might want to be making a dummy is because you want to take it to a conference, for example, or show at like an in person critique. Then you might want to choose the print. But in general, the standard is enough, especially if you think you're going to be e mailing it. A lot of times I will just flatten it so that other people can't make changes into it as easily. You can choose all your pages. I'm going to obviously do all my pages. Then I'm going to hit Done. And then then it's going to take a moment to download and then we can go to our download folder and open our file. That's how you would take your paper sketches and make them into a PDF dummy. All right, thanks for joining me for this video. In the next video, let's start wrapping things up. 14. Next Steps and Final Thoughts: Thanks so much for joining me in this class. I hope it's been really eye opening for you and you are excited to jump into this project of creating your very first picture book dummy. Before we jump off, I just wanted to go over some next steps for you. If you are either a beginning or an intermediate picture book illustrator, so you know how to use the skills learned in this class to further your career. If you are a beginner now you have a picture book dummy. And hopefully you have some finished illustrations from that dummy and you are able to put those into your portfolio. Hopefully, this exercise has helped you figure out the style that you are comfortable in illustrating. And it's given you an idea of what it would be like to work on an actual book project for a publisher or for somebody who's self publishing. If you are planning on self publishing, this has hopefully been a great exercise for you on designing your book and trying to figure all the pages out. And now you can move on forwards to creating final pieces for all of your spreads, and then getting them ready to self publish. If you're more of an intermediate illustrator and you've done some picture book dummies before, maybe this wasn't your first. Hopefully you've learned some new tips and tricks. And I've been able to help you kind of figure out what is a great professional way to submit for an agent or for a publisher. What I would love for you to do is really hone down on that style. Use a lot of those pieces from your dummy in your portfolio. If you're going to any conferences or any in person events where you're going to be able to get a critique. What I've done in the past is actually take that PDF dummy, and then print it out in booklet form. And then put that next to my portfolio on the table at an event. And then at events like CBI conferences, editors and agents are able to see that you can actually complete a book dummy. And they will take you more seriously as a picture book illustrator. And you're more likely to get hired if you can show that you can actually complete full books. And then the pieces that you've created for everybody, I hope that you are proud of them. And they are something not only to put in your portfolio, but also to put on social media. There is a great event on the first Thursday of every month called Kidlet Art Postcard. And a lot of times I will take one of the illustrations that I've created in the last month and make a postcard of it with my information on it and then I post that online on my social media. That's another great way to take the illustrations from these class and use them to promote yourself out in the Kidlet community. For the class project, you can either post your thumbnails, like that, one page of thumbnails, or you could post the individual final illustrations that you chose to do for this class. Either one is fine or you could do both. I'm happy to critique anything. If you would like a critique on your work, just mention that in your project description and I can give you feedback on some of it. I love to cheer everybody on, and I know everybody loves to see what other people have done in the class. I really hope that you take the time to post in the class gallery. And if you decide to post anything online, you can always tag me on Instagram. I'm under America draws, and then on pretty much everywhere else, I'm under Mirca Hogan. You can always tag me and then also use the hash tag Merica skillshare. And I just love to repost student work and cheer everybody on on the awesome work that you're doing. I have lots of other picture book related classes coming up and you can always follow me and then that way you get notified of new classes coming up. I hope you've enjoyed this class and I'll see you at the next one. Bye.