The Book of Drawings. Planning the pages

Now that the cover is complete I want to begin planning the interior of the book. To do this I will use cheap printer paper. I wanted my book to have similarities to old natural history books but be slightly different. My first plan was based on some of the books I had seen. The left page would have information about the animals while the right page will have an illustration. I played with some ideas of having fold out illustrations in the book. I liked some of these but I found that it didn’t work for some animals like the toad. Their body shapes didn’t seem to fit what I was doing. I also thought of putting pockets in the pages with small illustrations inside. This was something I have seen in some children’s activity books. One thing I tried which seemed to work really well was having paper leaves inside the pages.  The plan was to sow them into the bindings of the pages so they pop up into the space between pages, I thought this would add to the pond idea.

After experimenting I decided the leaves would be very interesting and fit in well with the pond theme. I decided to just stick with the simple layout of text and illustrations because I didn’t want the book to become too crowded.  I then used scrap paper to work out how many pages I would need. I came to the conclusion that I would need six sheets to complete the book. Below are some of my experiments.