Alpha Monsters Book layout. Rough first draft to final version

Before I started to produce Alpha Monsters I mocked up the entire thing first, using little thumbnail illustrations. This helps me plan the book ahead of time and rearrange the pages, decide what text goes where and so on. Originally the book was only supposed to be 24 pages long, but (being my first book ever)I forgot to take into account things like Title pages (those extra pages you often see at the start of books) and "Imprint" pages (that's the page that has all the babble about where it was printed and who published and where).

 In the end the book was 32 pages and it ended up being quite different from the first layout I had in mind. The extra pages meant there would be a lot more room to explore the Alpha Monster's world.

Anyway this morning I came across the very first rough layout I made and also the final version where I replace the rough sketches with the final artwork. This is very satisfying thing to do, as you see the book grow before your eyes and it gives you a good sense of where you are in the books production. You'll have to click these for a larger view, but I hope you enjoy seeing the two very different stages of the books life.

So here is the very first version I created. There are a few differences from the final version you'll notice. Obviously the story was cramped into a lot shorter format. Meaning a lot of the Monster spreads were a bit squashed. A couple of these pages ended up being taken out as the didn't really serve the story and it meant more space to draw MONSTERS! Which is really what the whole things is about :)

And this is the final layout and is almost exactly what you will see when you open the book (one page needed a little tweaking to make it right!). As I said, I would drop in each final page into this layout the moment I finished it, and slowly the book would come to life before my eyes.

I hope you enjoy looking at this process, and if you haven't got a hold of the book yet, hopefully it gives you some idea of what to expect :)