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Brian Wonders:  The Making of a Children's Book

The Making of a Picture Book: journal entry 11

THE BIG PICTURE.

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Here's a look at the big board!  Our book has 48 pages, and this is how I keep track of the progress on each page.  The spreads get printed out and posted up so I can stand back and get a look at the big picture at once.  It's incredibly helpful.  This is also helps me get a sense for the pacing of the images and how they flow from one page to another.  

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Green tags mean the page is done; pink tags mean there's still some work to do.  Yes, there's a lot of pink tags, but for the most part the pages just need a final pass of bubbles or a quick overall freshener, which I'll do in the computer. 

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The big board also helps in instances where I've made a change to the story that has had a rippling effect.  For example, after adding the bear to the story (Journal Entry 10), I needed to keep track of where he should reappear, meaning, popping him into pages that were already finished... 

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Here's another spread that is pretty close to being done (bottom right), but to which I'm going back and adding a shark.  In an early version of the book I had a whole page dedicated to a swarming school of these hundred-eyed sharks, but that idea ended up on the cutting room floor.  Then I thought, I'll just add the sharks to another page!