A bilingual picture book, built storyboard-first

780 words and a problem

Marisol had taught kindergarten for nine years. She wrote The Dark Is Just a Room for a child in her class who was frightened at night, and she wanted it in both English and Spanish because half her class lived between the two.

What she did not have was any sense of how illustration actually works. Her assumption — a common one — was that she would send the manuscript to an illustrator and receive pictures back.

Choosing an illustrator

We shortlisted four illustrators whose existing work already lived near the tone of the manuscript, and she reviewed portfolios. She chose an artist whose night scenes used warm rather than cold darkness, which turned out to be the single most consequential decision in the project — the whole emotional register of the book followed from it.

Character sheets first

Before any spread was drawn, the illustrator produced character sheets for Lucía: several angles, a range of expressions, different poses. Marisol asked for two rounds of changes. Lucía was initially drawn slightly too old, and her posture read as timid rather than careful — a distinction that mattered a great deal to a book about being deliberately brave.

Both changes cost a sketch. Discovered nine spreads later, they would have cost nine finished illustrations.

The storyboard changed the book

The storyboard is where the project turned. Laying all sixteen spreads out as thumbnails made two things obvious that were invisible in the manuscript.

First, the middle had three spreads doing the same job — Lucía moving through the dark room — where one would carry more tension. Second, the emotional turn was landing at the bottom of a left-hand page, so the reader met it without a page turn. Moving it to a right-hand page so the turn is the reveal changed how the book reads aloud completely.

Marisol has since said that the storyboard session was when she understood that a picture book is a designed object rather than a story with pictures added.

Bilingual layout and printing

Setting two languages on one spread without one feeling subordinate took several attempts. The solution was a shared typographic weight with a subtle colour distinction, rather than the usual approach of setting the second language smaller.

Colour proofing caught a problem nobody expected: the warm night blues that looked right on screen printed noticeably colder on the chosen stock. Two proof rounds and a paper change resolved it.