I’m about halfway through the first pass at my roughs (8 spreads sketched and 8 to go). I work them out on one sheet of paper so I can keep track of the over-all flow. Sometimes I come up with a couple of variations of one illustration. I’ll drawn the alternates out on separate pieces of paper and tape them down over the master page.

I’ve now cut out each sketch, scanned them in, dropped in type and mocked up a little rough booklet so I can get a feeling of how things will work in book format. Lots of stuff will still change and evolve between now and the point when I’m ready to send the roughs to my publisher, but this ‘check in’ stage allows me to catch big things that don’t work, or give me ideas for what I need to do for the yet-to-be drawn pages. It’ll also let me know if I’ve left enough room for the text.

I’ll check in quite a few times throughout the process to make sure that when I revise drawings I don’t inadvertently caused something important to fall in the gutter or closed up room I needed to leave for type.

Once I’ve got all the roughs drawn and ready to show the publisher, I’ll do a colour mood board to work out the colour flow through the book. As I’ve been drawing, I’ve also been making notes on colour, time of day etc and I’ll formalise that a bit more in the moodboard step.