I shared the full process of my newest picture book, We Are Jellyfish, over on my Substack email publication. I posted live as I was making the book, showing the full experience (with all the frustrations and winding trial-and-error!) from initial idea to completed book. You can read all those process posts here!

Here's an example of one of those process posts! :)

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12. Storyboarding the Illustrations

This was the week I began drawing the full storyboard, bringing together the written story, drawing experiments, and rhythm storyboard! It’s really starting to feel like a book! Ack!

First, I cleaned up and refined the overall spread designs I had created previously:

By the way, I’m working in grayscale now, so as not to get distracted by color choices during this stage!

Next, I laid in the written story text within this document:

The text is typeset in a very basic, generic Arial at 12pt font because I don’t want to get caught up in typography at this stage either. But it’s helpful to have a general idea of how much space I need to leave for the words before drawing.

Then I… started drawing!

I know this looks pretty refined for a first storyboard. And it is more detailed than I originally meant to create. But what I discovered, once I started sketching jellyfish vs. drawing or painting jellyfish (as I was doing in the style explorations), is that an unrefined sketch of a jellyfish just looks like a tangled mess of lines!

So for this sketched out storyboard to make any sense at all (to me or you), I had to put a bit more detail than perhaps I would normally draw at this stage for another topic. And once I started doing that for some of the sketches, it was hard not to do it for the others.

I’ve referenced many photographs from books, websites, and videos to create these drawings. I’ve tried not to get toooooo close to the originals, but I’d like to do a couple more refinements to push things further away from the references. It’s a tricky balance because, this is a nonfiction book so I want it to be somewhat realistic/accurate, but it’s also an illustrated children’s book, and I want it to be artistic and exciting.

My tentative game plan is to draw the storyboard somewhat realistically and add in more surreal touches in the final artwork. If that is my goal, I should probably try it out on a first pass at a final art spread before I commit to it.

Here are some of the photos I’m using as resource material:

Ok! So that is my task for next week… get farther away from these photo references, while still holding onto a kinda-sorta-accuracy!

Let’s push it!

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It's cool to look back on that process now that the book is done. It was a lot of work! I love sharing the process along the way because it helps motivate me to keep going. 

So I'd love to help motivate you and see what you're working on! Share your own process in the Project Gallery. It doesn't have to be finished and it most certainly won't be perfect—nothing ever is! Just show us whatcha got!

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If you're interested in seeing the full process of We Are Jellyfish, you can: 

• read all the process posts here
• buy We Are Jellyfish here
• and subscribe to my Substack here to get all future posts from me! :)

Thanks! <3