How to Storyboard a Picture Book, Spread by Spread

A finished picture book storyboard looks like something a five year old drew. Stick figures, scribbled shapes, horizontal lines standing in for text. Diana McDerMott, a children's book illustrator with 23 published titles, holds hers up in her Twotap course and says that is exactly what it is supposed to look like.

The storyboard is the stage beginners most want to skip. The manuscript is paginated, the characters are designed, and the real art feels close enough to touch. McDerMott's argument for stopping here anyway is economic: this is the cheapest possible time to make mistakes. Find out the composition does not work now, in a ten minute thumbnail, not after you have rendered a full spread. This post walks through her storyboard method, the composition principles behind it, and the pacing and text checks that turn a grid of scribbles into a working book.

What a storyboard actually is

A storyboard is a tiny rough version of your entire book, each spread drawn at roughly the size of a playing card, sometimes smaller. The goal is not beautiful drawings. The goal is to see the whole book at once, all 14 or 15 spreads laid out as a sequence, and ask whether it is working. Can you tell the story from the thumbnails? Are the page turns landing? Are two consecutive spreads accidentally using the same layout?

The quality of your storyboard has no relationship to the quality of your finished illustrations.

Diana McDerMott, "What Storyboarding Is & Why It Matters" (Part 3, Lesson 7), From Manuscript to Printed Book

She flags this for artists trained to make polished work, because rough drawing can feel like going backwards, even embarrassing to show a client. But rough is the feature. Working messy means you can test many versions of a spread in ten minutes instead of ten hours. Boxes with arrows are fine. A circle head on a triangle body is fine. If the shapes communicate the composition, the storyboard is doing its job.

She prefers paper over digital for this stage, because paper is faster and keeps you honest. You cannot zoom into a thumbnail drawn at playing card size and start obsessing over details. Digital works if that is your comfort zone; just keep the thumbnails small and resist the zoom. Either way, draw your rectangles at roughly the same ratio as your planned book, so the compositions transfer.

Three problems it catches early

McDerMott names three failures a storyboard exposes before they get expensive. Pacing: does the book build tension gradually and release it at the right moment, or does it front load the excitement and run out of energy? Laid out spread by spread, weak pacing is obvious immediately. Composition repetition: if every spread has the character centered, facing left, landscape behind, the book feels static no matter how beautifully each page is rendered, and you can only spot the pattern with everything visible at once. And text placement: if a composition fills the frame with no room for words, the storyboard is where you find out, while the fix is still free.

The composition principles behind the thumbnails

Before filling the grid, she runs through the principles worth keeping in the back of your mind. Divide a spread into a three by three grid and the four intersections are your visual sweet spots, where the eye naturally lands; centering your subject tends to split the page and go static. Leading lines, whether a road, a river, or a character's outstretched arm, can pull the eye left to right with the reading direction or inward toward the emotional center. Elements at three distances, near, middle, and far, make a spread feel like a real place instead of an arrangement of flat shapes. Squint at each thumbnail and check that the main character still reads as a clear silhouette. Leave negative space, both to rest the eye and to hold the text. And for every thumbnail, ask where your eye arrives first, and whether that is the right place.

These are guidelines, and books break them beautifully, but the difference is intention. Her test: when you feel the pull to break a rule, ask whether the story needs it or whether you just have not thought it through yet.

Four spread types and a moving camera

A book that is exciting on every page is exhausting. McDerMott's pacing toolkit starts with four spread types. The full bleed double page spread fills both pages edge to edge and is reserved for the most significant moments, because overuse kills its power. A single page illustration with text on the facing page gives the reader visual rest. The vignette, a small illustration floating in open space, suits intimate and quiet moments. And the panel split divides one spread into frames, perfect for passage of time or quick action sequences. A strong book uses all four; a weak one repeats one or two.

On top of spread type, vary the camera. A close-up where the face fills the frame is intense and intimate. The medium shot, waist or shoulders up, is the workhorse of picture books. A wide shot with a small character in a big environment establishes scale and can feel expansive or lonely. Bird's eye and worm's eye views feel dramatic precisely because they are rare. Her rule of thumb for the first pass: get something into every box, because a wrong thumbnail is more useful than a blank one, then hunt for three or more consecutive thumbnails that look alike and change one.

Plan the text before you paint

The last check is the one that ruins otherwise beautiful books: text placement. Dark text on a dark or busy background makes a spread unreadable, and readers should never miss text they were meant to see. Text and image are partners, not competitors. Text can live at the top of a spread, at the bottom, integrated into a deliberately simple area of the scene, or on its own facing panel. In the storyboard you mark it as a rectangle or a few lines, enough to prove that every spread has a home for its words with real contrast behind them. A spread with no obvious place for text is a red flag, and the fixes are simple at this stage: clear an area, split the spread, or calm the background.

Storyboarding is Part 3 of Diana McDerMott's From Manuscript to Printed Book on twotap.art. The course starts earlier, with pagination and character design, and continues past the storyboard into color planning, final rendering in Procreate, and preparing files a printer will accept. If you have a manuscript waiting in a drawer, her storyboard stage is where it starts becoming a book.