Making a New Picture Book

Here’s an unfinished story –

The story begins with the picture below, when a car gets dumped in a junkyard. The color picture shows what the junk yard is like — lots of rusting cars with stuff growing around them, and lots of animals living in the cars too.

When I got the idea for the story I began brainstorming — doing pencil sketches and writing, building the story in both pictures and words. The full color pictures show a publisher what I want the finished book to look like. But most of pictures right now are black and white drawings that show what will be in the final pictures.

The story begins when Axel, a taxi from the city, is towed to the junkyard. Below is a pencil drawing that shows the first full “spread” (two facing pages) in a dummy book. The dummy book helps me see how the story will look to the reader when they are turning pages in the finished book. My dummy book is full of black and white sketches. Below is the text for these two pages. In the final book the text will be placed in the “empty” spaces, (lower ground left, the sky on the right above the school bus.

“Just this morning two squirrels had gotten into his trunk and they were building a nest. Axel had never been happier.”

“When Axel was dumped in the junkyard, his windshield was cracked, his grill was smashed, and his engine was worn out.”

To see how the story grows in the next spread click here.