Part 1: Exploring & Planning
My Storybook Process
2020 | December
In the beginning...
During the Pandemic lockdown when I couldn’t see any family for Christmas, I started looking through old boxes of mementos and got inspired through various keepsakes and old written letters.
The rush of nostalgia gave me an idea for a story. I first jotted them down in Google Docs, thinking someday it could be used for a video game concept or a children's book. Ideally I would illustrate it, but I wasn’t confident in my drawing abilities to pull off something like that... at most maybe little doodles just for visual support...
... because right now my drawing abilities look like this:
(Actual first attempt)
Yeah, that's not gonna fly =___=
So I decided that mini visual sprinkles are the best I can do since I can’t draw to save my life, let alone a full-blown illustrated book in colour. I told myself it’ll be a “someday” task, and for now I’ll just write out the story for my own amusement *nod*.
I shared the idea with a friend, and she tried to convince me to give it a shot, even just to lay it out for future inspiration.
2021 | February
Taking that first step
And so I did. I completed the outline of the story, eventually switched from working in Google Docs to Google Slides. The benefits are:
1) I can edit and lay things out like a spread with placeholders in a live document (part of me still hopes that one day I can make illustrations happen).
2) It allows me to easily switch between laptop/phone to edit the latest version anywhere, any time, and any place (like on the subway with no signal or in the bathroom where the best ideas often come to mind).
3) It's the best way to draft things up before committing to serious softwares like InDesign (otherwise you're prone to nitpick on the tiniest things and stray from the big picture).
1st draft layout
This is the earliest version I could find in Google Slides (the one downside with no versionings at the time). It's probably version 3 or 4 at this point - the drawings actually came later around May. In the brainstorming phase there were many more of these black placeholder squares where the illustrations would appear.