Storyboarding

The storyboard is a great tool for seeing a story even before it is written. I came to realize that this is how I think.  When writing, I am searching for words to match the imagery I see. I was happy to read a quote by C.S. Lewis,

“I have never exactly ‘made’ a story. With me the process is much more like bird watching than like either talking or building. I see pictures…Keep quiet and watch and they will begin joining themselves up…I have no idea whether this is the usual way of writing stories, still less whether it is the best. It is the only one I know: Images always come first.”

This is the storyboard for Aurora, Tale of the Northern Lights. I wanted the book to be horizontal to create a vast picture space of wide open tundra. This is where I fell in love with double spreads and full bleed as a way to further expand the images. Double spreads are two pages that work together with the illustration and the words flowing across one big scene. Full bleed is when the color goes beyond the edges of the page where there is no white border.

 

The story of Aurora came to me in bits and flashes. I tried to capture the images and thoughts on tiny scraps of paper, anything that I could find to write on in my busy day with two small children in Alaska. I saved them one by one, eventually uncrinkling them and pasting them onto a piece of paper in hopes of preserving them into one whole thought. Some of them wove their way into the story of Aurora, some didn’t.

 

Quilt of Dreams storyboard

Here is a storyboard for Quilt of Dreams, one of many actually. This story was written and rewritten 10 times because the book was more or less an assignment. I had worked with the publisher on three books at that point,Coyote In Love, Aurora, and illustrated the cookbook, Baked Alaska. One of the editors thought of the beautiful title, Quilt of Dreams. It was a starting place and it began as a very long book that morphed into one thing or another based on sewing with my mother, dreaming, and finally arrived at a combination of the two, massively edited. The real fun began with the illustrations.