As an author-illustrator, I’m often asked whether I start with the words or the illustrations.
In the case of the first three books in The Accidental Diary of B.U.G. series, the short answer is: the words.
Here’s an extended version of how I worked on this series, in case you’re interested:
My writing and drawing process
- I complied all my ideas into a story.
- While beavering away with the text, I made comments in my document of doodle/picture ideas as I thought of them.
- I sent all the text along with my illustration ideas to my editor who considered the text before the picture ideas.
- Once the manuscript was semi-finalised, it was sent to a page designer. Her job was to lay out the text and send a document back to me with placeholders to indicate how much room I could have for each approved picture idea. Like this:
- I then drew pictures to fit the spaces and sent them back to her so she could bob them into the document. Like this:
- And the finished page looked like this:
There are currently three books in this series:
- The Accidental Diary of B.U.G.
- The Accidental Diary of B.U.G: BASICALLY FAMOUS
- The Accidental Diary of B.U.G: Sister Act
For each book, my writing and drawing process was the same: IDEA then WORDS then PICTURES.
Click the text below to find out more about this series.