Creating a storyboard for a Children's Book

Creating a storyboard for a Children’s Book will assure your illustrations are consistent with the flow of the story.

A written storyboard

You don’t have to be an artist capable of quickly producing hand-drawn sketches to create a storyboard of your story. Storyboard ideas can be a written description of the desired illustration. The description should describe a photo, not a complex motion picture with multiple scenes and actions.

Creating a storyboard give you options of incorporating single page illustrations, double page illustrations, or combinations of both. Double page illustrations can be helpful in areas where there is a lot of text. Double page illustrations require careful planning to ensure that nothing important (like a face) obscured by the binding remains in the area of the center gutter.

*A sample of double page illustration with a full page bleed designed for a 8.5 x 11, portrait page orientation.* The binding gutter will not obscure any important elements in the center part of the illustration.

Illustrations and Portrait or Landscape Page Orientation

Examples of design elements added to illustrations to change landscape illustrations into portrait format

It is very difficult to fit illustrations drawn in a landscape format into a portrait layout. IngramSpark does not currently offer any landscape binding sizes (wider than tall), so this could be a very real problem if your illustrations are designed for a landscape page. If you find yourself with finished illustrations that won’t fit your book size, we can possibly work with them by adding design elements or extending illustrations to fill in for the awkward fit.