After I'd finished a storyboard I was happy with, the next step was to make a small dummy book. I would really recommend doing this as it is so helpful to see how the pace of your story works and to check that the scale of your characters is varied through the book. As you can see from the covers above I had also started to play around with techniques to use for the penguins but I will talk about that in a later post.
As you can see from these phone pics (please excuse the blurriness), I make my dummies as a concertina. I went to see the marvellous Mini Grey give a talk about her picture books while I was a student on the MA course, and this was a method she shared. It makes it very easy to cut out any pages you're not happy with and replace them with new ideas without having to make a new dummy.
I showed my first dummy book to Pam Smy, a wonderful tutor on the MA course and she suggested making more of Fluff and Billy falling out and the ensuing silence. We then worked out a way of changing the pagination so that there would be an extra page with no text at all, emphasising the break in their friendship. I then changed the dummy book accordingly, and this is how the story stayed until it was published 3 years later!
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