Story Board and Mock Book

At this stage in my project I wanted to start to make the storyline and ideas for page layouts more certain so I could start to develop the style and composition of the book. I chose to use a 32 page, A4 portrait format, as most of my sketches had been done in an A3 landscape sketchbook so would fit nicely into this format.

To fit into the 32 page book I had to decide on which things I was going to make my little girl imagine herself as. I decided to keep the images in a pair of "before" and "after" images like my initial sketches had been, and I also had to take into account how many pages would be taken up by the cover, beginning and end. This left me with 10 pages, which I split into 5 pairs.
The pages I chose in the end were:

• a leaf
• a cat
• a flower
• the moon
• a giant

I now had to put these ideas into an order that a story would fit around. When thinking of these ideas I had also been thinking about the reasons that a child would want to become them. What is so great about being a cat that a child would want to become one? Why would a child want to become a leaf? What use would a child have from becoming a giant? Children don't want to become these things for no reason, so I began to think about what attributes these things have that a child would want.

I decided upon a reason for each of the objects that the child wanted to be.

The reasons were:

• a leaf - to fly in the wind/fall from the tree
• a cat - to go exploring/go on adventures/crawl around everywhere
• a flower - so butterflies would land on me/would smell nice
• the moon - stay up all night/live with the stars
• a giant - to reach everything/to be taller than my older brother

I sketched these ideas out in my book as small, rough thumbnails to make sure the order was right, then I started to take each idea and expand on it to get a rough composition for each page.

Once I had completed my storyboard in my sketchbook, I decided to create a basic mock book to get a better idea of how my drawings look together, and also to see the effect the fold down the middle of the page would have on the composition. I just used basic sketches to show the layout of each page.

Now the storyboard and layouts of each page are finalised I will spend time creating images that are more finished and final. I will use the images from my storyboard in my experiments and eventually create my final images using them.