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For me, page layout is probably the hardest step of putting together a book, but also the most rewarding. To be successful here you have to balance a number of things:

• Composition. This is the most important. Your composition relays so much information to the viewer about how to feel when they look at the image. Is the scene happy, sad, mysterious, tense? You should emphasize that feeling with the way the picture is laid out. I highly recommend Rowland Wilson’s notes about composition. Mark Kennedy shared them on his blog here.
• Storytelling. What story point does the viewer need to come away with? If there was no text, what would they think is happening? How can you stage and pose your characters so that the acting is clear? Disney storyman and children’s book author Bill Peet was the master at this. (He singlehandedly storyboarded all of 101 Dalmations, AHEM.)
• Text. It can be annoying, but you always have to remember that people need to be able to READ the book! It’s not just about pretty pictures. This means leaving enough breathing room around text boxes and deciding how you are going to split up the manuscript.
• Consistency. Keeping your characters and environments on model and looking the same throughout many pages is no easy feat. It helps to pin up your turnarounds above your work area so you can always view them at a glance. You also have to be consistent in your tone. What type of book are you making? Is it epic and cinematic? Is it simplistic and for pre-schoolers? Choose the right camera angles, poses, facial expressions, etc that match your tone.

Before I start any drawing, I like to break down the manuscript into the right number of pages. In most cases for a kid’s book this is 32. (Gwendolyn is 64 pages, cause we are dumb and overambitious.) Sometimes the writer or publisher will provide you with a page layout, and even descriptions of the imagery they’d like on each page. I usually take that with a grain of salt and provide my own alterations if I think it could be  arranged differently. Here’s what the text-only layout basically looked like:

Once the text layout has been approved, on to thumbnail sketches for each page:

You can see that I dropped in models of the main characters in the center for reference. I also write a lot of text notes and ideas here. These thumbnails often change significantly in the next step, which is the “rough” page lay in phase. Here are a few examples of page roughs:

You can see in the first couple images that I usually keep the characters on one layer and the backgrounds on another. Sketching in Photoshop makes this easy, and allows me to edit character placement and design quickly without messing up the background. I will also sometimes lay in tone, if it’s essential to making the image read well, as in the image above. The next step in this project was “tight pencils,” which I ended up doing digitally as well. Because I have already laid out the text and figured out the poses and acting, I can focus solely on making clean, appealing pencil drawings here.

Previously – Part 1: Preproduction  ——   Next up – Part 3: Final Color and Cover Design

Roger Nix, President at Six is available for sale from Three Bean Press or on the iBookstore if you’ve got an iOS device.