CHARACTER DESIGNS
These character design explorations I created while working on the storyboard, Nina gave me photos of the girls so I tried to get their likeness into my drawings and also figure out what kind of style to choose for the book (which kind of eyes for the girls for example). For the treehouse it was a question of what colour the doors would be, which background colour would fit best and also, what kind of ways the girls would be able to climb up on it, a slide, stairs, a ladder, some vines or just branches?

STORYBOARDS
At first I made a storyboard by sketching in pencil - black and white (you can see it if you scroll further down). But since this was going to be such a colourful book I scanned in the first storyboard version and painted over it to give rough pointers of where the colours would be. The storyboard developed with every version. I had the idea of letting the parts where Niah goes into the “scary” part of the world black/white/grey coloured so that there would only be colour in the “happy” part of the world. But in the end it was nicer to have it all coloured since it is a book for children.

Here the first version of the storyboard - back then I had imagined it to be the text being on one page and the illustrations on the other page (like in one of my favourite German’s children’s book “Tomte Tummetott”.) But as the book developed Nina asked for doublespread illustrations and the publisher Shelly Wilhelms thought it would be more interesting if the text was in a different place every page. I have removed the text here for copyright purposes.

OTHER CHILDREN’S BOOKS DEVELOPMENT
And here are some exploratory sketches I did for other children’s books in development.