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Friday, 9 May 2014

Making a Picture Book Dummy

Tools for making a dummy

As publishers lean more and more towards picture books both written and illustrated by artists, creating a presentable dummy to show illustrations and text together is an important skill for illustrators today. This week Margaret Sturton explains one method.

I have had a fair amount of experience in bookbinding sketchbooks but making a dummy book is a challenge. I think the problem lies in having images and text already on the page that have to be kept in order. I used to try sticking images into a sketchbook but the results were disappointingly messy and changes were time consuming.

I learnt the method described below last year. Watching a tutor make one made the learning process easier and the finished book was good enough to show editors and agents.

The main challenges of making a dummy book like this are the range of possible mistakes. I have stuck a dummy book together so all the pages were back to front. I have sliced off text and once when cutting down the book I strayed irretrievably from the ruler. I now check the order and orientation of the pages over and over again.

The whole process takes around 30 minutes to an hour. Good luck!

Materials

Metal ruler
Embossing tool or equivalent blunt point
Box wood modelling tool or other blunt knife for folding. A butter knife would do just as well
Sharp Stanley knife or scalpel
Cutting board
32 pieces of double sided sticky tape – length about half the height of the page (10-11cm for A4)

Your book printed out or photocopied as double page spreads. I usually scale down the pages to 70 or 80%. You should have a total of 16 pages if you are printing a double spread to A4 or A3 and have included end pages and title pages.

Method

This is a fairly easy way of mocking up a dummy book without the hassle of trying to split up the spreads as a publisher would.

1) Put the cover to one side. If you have the front and back cover on separate sheets, don’t worry, you can sort that out later. The other pages should be stacked in order, first to last page.

2) Take each page in turn, image side up, and score down the centre line using the embossing tool and a ruler.

Keep the ruler in place, fold and flatten the centre line using the modelling tool so the page lies flat.

Stack the folded pages in order. Do not worry if the pages look wonky. That will be sorted out later.

3) Take a page from the top of the stack. Stick a strip of tape to the folded page close to the spine.

Work through the rest of the stack, from the back to the front of the book. Keep checking the orientation of the pages.

4) Stick each page to the one in front using the guides on the cutting board to keep the spine lined up. Work from front to back.

5) Fitting the cover is the next step. Using the cutting board as a guide, score two lines, 2mm from either side of the centre line.

Use the knife to flatten the folds. You need a snug fit so make the fold for the spine smaller than the book.

6) Making sure the cover and book are the same way round; stick the cover to one end-page along the spine.

Flip the book over and stick the cover to the other end-page along the spine. To make this as neat as possible, stick the tape close to the spine.

If your front cover and back page are separate, do the steps above with a blank sheet of paper. Cut and stick the images on afterwards.

7) Mark pencil guides on the edges of the book to show where the images end. Use the cutting board to square the book. Trim down the top and bottom with a metal ruler and scalpel. Cut away a couple of pages at a time. Work from the spine to the outer edge and remove the scraps as they come loose.

8) Mark guides for the final rough edge and trim down.

9) Stick tape inside each set of blank pages.

Remove the tape backing and stick the pages together, working from the back to the front so the final book lies flat.

The finished dummy

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Margaret Sturton is a writer/illustrator based in Winchester. Her website is at www.margaretsturton.co.uk

Thursday, 8 August 2013

Picture Book Basics - Sketches and Layout

In the second part of a series for illustrators starting out in Picture Books, Words & Pictures Illustration Editor John Shelley takes a look at planning images and layout.

So you have a story, and maybe some character studies and other sketched drawings. The next stage is to plan out the book and make a dummy.

Storyboards

A common starting point for illustrators is to mark out a storyboard on a single sheet of paper, representing the whole book in small thumbnail sized squares. This allows the artist to pencil in the basic design of each page, plan how the story unfolds over the pages, divide up the text, see where the dramatic points are, and consider the rhythm of the images. As the sketches are thumbnail size and very simple it's an easy matter to rub out and redraw. Some illustrators draw tiny sketches or write the text on sticky notes which they can switch around the pages, though I find these have the annoying habit of curling up and falling off!

storyboard for one of my recent books Jack and the Beanstalk, note the stickies!

Sketching and Layout

Having roughly planned the book it's time to make larger sketches for each page or spread. Personally I draw pencil roughs at A5 size per page (so A4 for a double page spread) scan these to make my dummy and later enlarge for the final artwork stage, but everyone will have their own method.

All books (indeed all illustrators!) are different and the variety of style, composition and design is much too big a subject to summarise here. However here are a few commonly accepted pointers:

Boxed, Vignette, Spot and Full Bleed

(This may sound somewhat obvious, but it's worth clarifying!)
In classically constructed books, a "boxed" illustration has straight defined edges, possibly with a border or frame, and sits within the confines of the page, so there is a gap between the image and the trim (i.e. the edge of the page). The illustration might be cropped from a loose-edged original, or painted to a ruled edge. As the border encloses the scene these are particularly suited to images with a considered, balanced composition.

Boxed in illustration from Levi Pinfold's Greenaway award winning Black Dog. Notice how the dog's paw breaks the straight line to bring the illustration out of the page. Pinfold also includes a small Spot by the text. (© Templar Publishing)

Vignettes are illustrations with faded or loosely defined edges. The loose edges incorporate the white of the surrounding page to give the image space, lightness and draw the viewer into the scene.

Quentin Blake is a master of vignettes, the background is minimal but loose borders encourage the reader to mentally fill in the rest. (© Quentin Blake)

A spot illustration is a small free-floating motif, usually with no background. In picture books spots are particularly useful as visual addenda to the main narrative.

Bleed refers to part of an illustration that runs off the page edges, 'full bleed' means an image that entirely fills the page and is cropped by the trim. Nowadays very many picture books are full bleed throughout, however it's particularly effective when suddenly brought into play for the most dramatic and panoramic images.

Axel Scheffler double page showing a full bleed illustration and two vignettes
(© Alison Green Books)

Big or Small?

A small image on a page surrounded by white space focuses on detail, so it might suggest quiet intimacy, or a key-hole view of a drama about to unfold. Some books begin with smaller images, then gradually open up to full bleed as the drama unfolds. The reverse can work too - big to small. A classic example of this approach is Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, where the first and last illustrations are small, with very wide white margins, while the central fantasy spreads are full bleed.

Another use of small images is to break up a series of actions into details on a page. So for example, a piece of text might describe a character putting on a coat, then shoes, then tieing on a hat... one single image would suffice to cover all these actions, but by separating each into a series of vignettes or spots on a page a sense of time and motion can be introduced.

sequential images from Emma Chichester-Clark
(© Emma Chichester-Clark)

Crescendos and Patterns

Picture books are a little like songs in that there is usually some kind of pattern or structure that the whole book follows, a regular rhythm flowing through, with choruses of loud, dynamic pages at key stages. It's equally true of both text and illustration. An image near the front of a book might be reflected with a similar design later to create a resonance.

Two spreads from my in-the-pipeline book Stone Giant, the top image is page 06/07, the lower is page 26/27. I designed these two spreads with their sequences of square blocked in images to mirror each other, though they're at opposite ends of the book.

Page Turning

A key element of picture books is the need to move the narrative forward - the reader should always be encouraged to turn the page. This can be done by building tension and expectation in the image or text, ensuring plenty of movement from left to right, and drawing the reader's attention to the page corners.

Rules are Made to be Broken!

Well, some of them perhaps. It's not necessary to mix image sizes in a book - regularity works well if the story has a strong rhythm. Full bleed images don't have to be panoramic. Within these basic patterns all kinds of fun can be had by breaking up these types and inventing ways to combine/contrast layouts. In fact this is what makes picture books so interesting. Go wild, be clever, be crazy! But remember, however mad the page layout, the narrative has to move forward, it has to be understandable as a book.

The key thing is to follow instincts suggested by the text, do what the story conjures.

challenging design and typography from Sarah Fanelli (© Phaidon Press)

Things to be careful of:
Remember the gutter (the book's hinge)! Avoid putting busy elements in the part of the book closest to the spine, they'll be lost in the final product. Be especially careful not to place key characters in the gutter!

Consider the text - where will it lie? How much space will it require? Will it run over the illustration or be separate on the page? Likewise, leave a good gap between text and the gutter and page trim.

Page design is a big topic with myriad aspects. It's a good idea to peruse a lot of picture books and examine how other artists solve the challenges of page layout. There's also a lot of inspiring stuff on the Web if you dig around - for example Design of the Picture Book is a useful resource.

Dummies

Some illustrators make very elaborate dummies before submitting to publishers, but editors frequently say that a dummy that is too polished can actually make it difficult to consider the story. It's often recommended that artists sketch out spreads in simple black and white roughs, nothing too complicated, overlay the text, and draw just one or two finished images in colour to give an indication of the final look.

One of my pencil roughs for Halloween Forest, from the first dummy. The finished image is here

Personally I sketch all my dummies in pencil on loose sheets, scan in to Photoshop, adjust, then lay out using InDesign, adding the text. I might spend a long time tweaking, changing around and so on before I'm happy with the result. Finally I'll save as a lightweight .pdf which I can then either email to my agent/art director or print out, clip into a plastic file and show as a physical dummy.

John Shelley is the Illustration Feature Editor of Words & Pictures and current Central East Network coordinator.
He's illustrated over 40 books for children, many of them published in Japan where he lived for many years. His next title The Stone Giant is scheduled for release by Komine Shoten in Tokyo this autumn, and Charlesbridge in the US in Spring 2014. www.jshelley.com

Thursday, 11 July 2013

Picture Book Basics - Understanding Format

In the first of a series of articles on picture book basics, Words & Pictures Illustration editor John Shelley offers some beginner guidelines to format.

One of the first problems picture book illustrators and writers face is - how long should my book be? How much text, how many images, how many pages, what proportions and size?

Text versus Illustration

What we generally refer to as a "picture book" covers everything from pop-ups to e-books, graphic novels to non-fiction, baby books to sophisticated. But whatever the format, they fit into one of two types - story books, where the text tells the whole story and can be logically read without images, and true picture books, where the pictures and words combine together to tell the story. Folk tales (old and new) are a good example of story books as, being designed to be read aloud, they don't require illustration in order to be understood. The illustrations are there to reinforce and enhance the reading experience. But in true picture books the text is pared down to just the narrative, illustrations fill in the description, and may include wordless sub-plots. Thus to understand the story fully the reader has to read both the illustrations together with the text, words alone would be insufficient without the images.

Here are double page spreads from two very different books:

Publishers have their own unique requirements for picture books based on the age group, type of book and the markets they target, in the UK 900 words is about the accepted maximum, but this is getting shorter as many houses pursue US co-editions where current trends are for no more than 500 words, and frequently less. There are exceptions and cross-overs, this year's Greenaway Award winner Levi Pinfold's Black Dog is a 32 page picture book with relatively full text. David Fickling once told me not to worry about word count, "just write what the story needs!" Story books have been tough to sell for a long time, but I like to think there is a growing revival of longer texts, nevertheless be aware the project is a harder sell if it's outside commonly accepted formats.

Number of Pages

Picture books are constructed from signatures. Pages are laid out and printed together on large sheets, which are cut in half (giving 4 sides), then half again (8 sides), then folded, making a bundle of 16 pages called a “signature”. Many picture books consist of two signatures sewn together, resulting in a 32 page book. It's the most common format, and as common is generally easier to produce, it's best to submit dummies with a 32 page plan. However for slightly extra cost an extra half sheet (8 pages) can be added, making 40 page (2.5 signature) and 24 page (1.5 signature) books. Three signatures would create a 48 page book, four a 64 pager and so on. Even more confusingly, on rare occasions sheets are removed too - my last book in Japan, a version of Jack and the Beanstalk, is an irregular 44 page separate ended book - that's three signatures with one sheet (4 pages) replaced by separate endpapers.

Construction of a hardcover 32-page separate-ended book. Jacket flaps are quite unusual for picture books in the UK now, but still very common in the US and many other countries.

How many pages are actually usable for the story depends on whether the book is “Separate-Ended” or “Self-Ended”.

Separate-ended books have two separate sheets (usually in a coloured cheaper paper) as blank endpapers. That means all sides of the printed signatures are available to use, page 1 and page 32 of a 32-page book are the first and last pages. Commonly page 1 just carries a simple Half Title (i.e. A plain page with just the title), pages 2-3 are a more elaborate Title Page or frontispiece and p.32 can be used as the last page of the story (though often it just has a vignette motif or is left blank). If the text starts at p.4-5 that makes up a maximum 14 and a half spreads (29 pages) available for the story.

32 page separate ended layout. The brown pages are the plain endpapers in a coloured paper; yellow indicate those available for use for the story.

Self-ended books however are pasted directly onto the cover boards with no separate endpapers. So, in the case of a 32-page self-ended book, page 1 and page 32 are glued down and never seen, pages 2-3 and 30-31 are used as the endpapers, and pages 4-5 are the title pages. That leaves 12 spreads (24 pages) available for the actual story, or just 11 if a half-title page is included. Self-ended books often have illustrated endpapers because the pasted side is the same paper as the rest of the book.

32-page self-ended picture book with no half-title. Brown pages are pasted down on the boards, the ochre pages can be (though not always) used as printed endpapers. Yellow pages are those available for the story and illustrations

By the same token, if the publisher uses all 32 pages but still wants illustrated endpapers then the coloured paper is replaced by printing paper, which then classifies the work as a 40-page self-ended book.

Confused? Have a look through your bookshelf and check the endpapers of your picture-books – blank ones in a different paper are separate ended.

But hold on! You say - what about e-books? surely they can be any format and page count we want? Yes that's true, but consider that most publishers produce traditional paper editions alongside ebook versions, so the old rules still apply!

Page proportions

Another common conundrum is what size and proportion should the paper trim be? For dummy submissions it's not usually necessary to determine exact page proportions - if the book is taken on by a publisher eventual sizes will be amended. Some publishers will have specific requirements for page size, especially in the case of series. Other times it's a matter of consultation between illustrator and art director. The most important thing in the first sketch stage is to decide whether the book will be portrait (i.e. taller than wider) or landscape (wider than taller). The pictures may dictate this - common sense suggests that stories including a lot of wide background vistas may work better in landscape format, those with lots of vertical elements like buildings, trees and full figure characters work best in portrait. Exactly square formatted books are uncommon, usually seen in titles for the very young, publishers are less keen however for older age groups.

My book The Boat in the Tree was set by a river, which suggested a lot of horizontal panoramas, so I used landscape proportions. This book was conceived as a 32 page separate-ended book, but was increased to 40 page self ended when I was asked to illustrate the endpapers

Jack in the Beanstalk however is all about vertical beanstalks, tall ogres and soaring castles, so portrait format was an obvious choice. I actually planned the book to be even taller and narrower, but my Japanese editor felt it would be awkward on the shelf and requested more width. 44 page separate ended story book

For sketched dummies, one way to decide format is to focus on the key images you want to draw for the book, take some page measurements from published books you think fit the same proportions and base your planning on those. If they like the dummy, an editor will soon tell you of any amendments.

Some books use unusual size or proportions as a key element in the design/storytelling process, however consider that the book has to fit comfortably on the shop shelf. As ever, the more challenging the format, the more difficult it is to get it published!