505: story concepts + storyboarding them

I finally got around to making some ideas. I'm not a writer so I'd mostly been avoiding it but surprise: it didn't help! I decided to write the ideas out first because it's a lot quicker than drawing and I just wanted to get ideas out. These were all vague notes and not what writing would actually be in the book, which I found to be a helpful way of working.

I had three main concepts:

1. a narrative based story about a character hiding from/  crushing fears by being really small/ really big with a vague sort of moral about how being normal sized and just facing your fears is more helpful!
2. a purely visual book of a character's / your perspective's journey through several *scary* environments but the character is always brave and happy
3. a simply written book of 'explaining' scary things to children but mostly in a fun way. The book would follow a basic formula of "is X too Y? (explanation)". Basically the same as those sketches I did before. I think this one has opportunity to have fun with type/ lettering though that's always risky

I then storyboarded them in a basic way to get my head around them visually. I couldn't see the second story being engaging so focused more on 1 and 3. I was worried because the first concept seemed to me like the one with the most opportunity to be really sophisticated in terms of children's illustration but I felt much more confidence in the third. Ben showed me Paul Rand's 'Sparkle And Spin' which too is simple in concept but has some really engaging and playful imagery. I don't want to miss out on an opportunity by not going with the first story but I can't get my head around how to make this into a beautiful narrative particularly in the time I have. Looking at Rand and others like Blexbolex I think I still have the opportunity to make the third idea something good if I get the pacing and imagery right. It too could have a subtle narrative, so i've gone for that one!

Paul Rand