The balcony

The Balcony was my 2nd authored picture book and the first wordless.
I had always wanted to create a wordless picture book ever since i was at uni. The idea of creating a world and a story with just pictures seemed like such a tantalising challenge to me!
The of use of clever colour changes and page design were great ways to help guide the reader through the story and through the emotions within the story. I learnt a lot whilst making this book, and i hope to be able make another wordless book one day.

This book was created using a mixture of mechanical pencil and digital colouring in photoshop.

I'll take you through some of the development which went into this book.
Because this book was wordless, I had to do alot of sketch development and building a visual library of the world. Because there was no words which could explain the story everything relied on the visuals.
I started with some character sketches...

...Then some botanical and scenery sketches...

...And once I had drawn alot of botanicals, scenery, characters etc I started drawing out rough ideas for pages of the book. Playing with compositions and how best to show the story just through images.

The compositions are very rough at this stage and not set in stone, im just feeling around for the best way to tell this story.

As well as finding my way with compositions, I start adding colour at this early stage- even though I usually wait until later in the process. Sometimes I just cant help my self. But it was useful in the end because I was able to rule out this colour palette quicker than if I had started later with colour development.

I started to draw out some more solid and well formed page layouts and compositions, really playing with the tallness of apartment block and the botanical forms helped me to realise that the shape of this book had to be tall and thin.

This is an early story board. It really helped now I had all my sketchbook development work, visual library and that I knew the unusual tall shape of the book, because now I could really start to visualise and plan the story board and pacing of this book.

And of the last stages for this book after the story board had gone through multiple versions and was mostly finalised, is the colour! one of my favourite bits.
The colour for this book was fairly easy to figure out- its 5 colours in totals and I already knew that I wanted the apartment block to be a bright rusty red colour, so it was then just another 4 left to figure out.
I also found it helped to decide on the colour palette because I knew I needed a palette which could work for both day scenes and night scenes.
All these requirements helped me to nail down the right palette for this book.