Irony and Contradiction

While the riots in Charlotte were going on, I was in my studio listening to the news and creating this illustration for an educational publisher here in the US. My directions were to include an Asian teacher, a Hispanic girl, an African American boy, a white girl and a white boy. The irony and contradiction of it was mind-blowing. Was I really in the same country?

Writers and illustrators for children have always been mindful of the variety of races that surround us not only in the U.S but in the world. Including people of different ethnicities, and writing about different cultures make literature that is enlightening and illustrations that are rich and interesting.

The same goes for life.

Storyboarding for Film vs Storyboarding for Books

Although I have been creating storyboards for my books for many years, I was curious to know how to make them for film. Are they different? This summer I took a storyboarding class at RISD with the talented Drew Gormley and learned there are many differences. As a picture book artist, the one that I found most notable is that in film there is more time and space to tell your story. When you storyboard for a picture book, you have a limited number of pages (usually 32 for most traditional picture books) and you lose the first 3 or 4 pages to front matter. The images you choose to tell your story are limited to the remaining 28 or 29 pages. But in a storyboard for film, you are creating camera shots rather than pages and while each shot must move the story forward, there is more freedom to spend a little time within a scene if necessary to create drama, build suspense or land a punchline.

The prompt for this little storyboard was; a tortoise, a lady, and a bench.