How to Create a Children's Book Storyboard • CANVA • Free!!

[Music] hey guys this is kayla with becky's graphic design in nashville tennessee and today i will be showing you how to use canva.com to create a storyboard for your children's book so here we have canva.com now there are two different versions of canva there's the free version which doesn't cost anything all you have to do is sign up with your email and then there is premium canva or they call it pro i think um and pro canva comes with a little more business oriented um tools and extra access to content like stock photos for what we're doing today we can use either pro or free either version will work i'm going to go ahead and log into canva here i'm going to click on this button here that's the login here i'm going to enter my email and my password okay here we are logging in this is your canva dashboard and this is where it's going to show your most recent projects um and things that you have created on the sidebar here there's a several different options this brand kit this is part of the premium canva here we can see all of our assets and our colors for becky's graphic design you can also upload fonts and actual hexadecimal colors but we don't need to worry about this today all we're doing is creating a storyboard for a children's book i want to go back to home and we are going to go over here to create a design i'm going to click on this and then go past all of this stuff down to where it says custom size i'm going to click on that and i'm going to change this measurement from pixels to inches now if you are one of our authors working with becky's graphic design probably by this point you have already chosen a height and a width for your book if you're doing a standard children's book it's probably going to be an 8x10 book possibly a 6x9 for this example we're going to assume that we have an 8x10 children's book i'm going to enter the height here that's 10 and i'm going to enter the width but i'm going to double it we are going to be making a storyboard for the inside of the book not the outside so the interior panels are going to be two pages side by side like this that's called a spread so that means when we create this document we need it to be double the width of the cover of the book it can't just be the actual outside outside dimensions it must be the interior dimensions so if we want the final book to be 8 by 10 i'm going to double the width and make it a 16 by 10 design here is our first canvas i'm going to go over here to file and change a couple of options i want to show the print bleed on this book bleed is what happens at the edge of your document i added this image here if you can see if i push this image into the corner of the document there's still a little bit of white space here where the bleed is this is the trim line so when this document goes to get trimmed i need to make sure that this picture goes all the way to the edges otherwise there will be a white space at the very edges of the paper where that trim left a little bit there so you have to account for that at the edges you have to go a little bit over the size that you need i'm going to go ahead and delete that but i'm going to leave the bleed setting there this little border on the exterior there's a couple of other options you can use in canva as well you can apply margins guides and show rulers i'm going to go ahead and leave these off for now i shouldn't need them all right so let's go ahead and put a divider down the middle of this paper so we can kind of see the differences between page one and page two i'm going to search over here for line i'm going to search in elements if you're another fellow designer out there don't try to hold shift or control as you do this because things get a little wonky when you do holding shift uh maintains an aspect ratio while resizing but for now i just want this at 90 degrees i'm going to pull this down on either side and then i'm going to transform or move it into the middle of the page okay now we can see here that we have page one and page two the purpose of creating the storyboard is to help your artist or your illustrator figure out what type of illustrations and how they need to format them a lot of children's books will have an illustration on one side as such and then on the other side they will have text on the opposing page we can see here that my line has disappeared i'm going to move this gray box to the back so i'm right clicking and then clicking send to back now our line's back on front i'm going to go over here and grab a text box i'm just going to add this body text here i'm going to click and add that to the document i'm going to make it a little larger and then let's write a little bit of a story we're going to say bob took his bicycle to the bark okay we want to give our illustrator an idea of what we want to go in the image so i'm going to go over here to elements and i'm going to search for bicycle let's pick this one here now remember we are just creating a storyboard these are not the actual illustrations for your book it's just helping your illustrator to get an idea of what you want in the book a lot of these elements here these clip art sort of things you can change the color of them by going up here to this little block and just selecting a new color i'm just going to pick this dark blue i'm going to size this down and put that here like that all right now we need an image for bob i'm just going to search for stick person and we'll let this guy here be bob i'm going to drag him into the image as well and size him down bob can stand here with his bicycle now we said that bob took his bicycle to the park so let's add a couple of trees as well yeah let's get these trees and we're gonna change the color of those as well okay now we have a very simple uh layout here for our illustrator to look at the illustrator can now look at this and create this image in their own style with whatever specifications you have for them but now they know what text will be paired with the image that they are creating this can really increase the understanding of your story if there is a disconnection between the text and the image sometimes the story doesn't flow that well so making sure that the artist and the writer have a clear understanding of each other's work really helps the final product come out much better so we've done page one and page two here let's add another page i'm gonna copy this line over i'm gonna do control c scroll down and then use ctrl v to paste that it should paste it in the same location now let's say for this spread that there's no words this time we're going to create a an illustration that goes across a spread meaning two pages not just the one i'm going to go ahead and grab my background color here i'm going to copy it over and i'm going to send it to the back next i'm going to stretch it all the way across like so now the illustrator knows that this is intended to be a full illustration let's grab bob and his bicycle i'm going to copy them down to this page let's make them really big you see here how the illustration can stretch across two pages we just want to make sure that no important elements like say bob's face or right in the middle it could look a little funny in the final product other things like the middle of this bicycle that's okay we'll leave that there let's say that bob sells some birds we'll add those over here up in the sky all right here's our spread that two page spread with no words just illustration all right and let's add one more page now if we don't want to start all over again i could instead go up here and hit duplicate page which then sticks it directly underneath the page i copied it from we can use these two little arrows here to navigate this page down to the bottom if you no longer want a page like this blank one that i added you can click on this trash can icon here to delete it all right so now i have a copy of page one which is not page three let's write some new text here let's say that bob bought a hot dog let's get rid of our trees maybe we'll mix up bob and his bicycle let's see if there is a hot dog stand here on canva huh would you look at that there actually is one okay we'll add in this hot dog stand man if we want to make it look like bob is standing in front of the hotdog stand i'm going to send this to the back and as you can see there is a hotkey for the order of things that's control open bracket all right now it looks like bob is standing in front of the hot dog stand and there we go all right so now we have a three-page story about bob taking his bicycle to the park seeing some birds and purchasing a hot dog now i want to show this to my illustrator so i'm going to go up to download and i'm going to download this as a pdf we can use the high quality or the standard one it doesn't really matter if you have a lot of images you might want to use the small file size one or else emailing it might become a burden this one should be okay to use the high quality pdf print i am going to include the bleed on here so i'm going to check box this and i'm going to go ahead and download it another feature of canva is that you can use a shareable link if you don't want to download the actual file people can view this file online but i'm just going to go ahead and x out of that now we can see down here i have my finished pdf file let's go ahead and open that up and see how it looks there we go on the corners you can see these little crop marks this is indicating where this paper will be cut in the final production and we can see that we safely have a line of extra color beyond that trim mark that means that the bleed is going to go all the way to the edges and this white space and this little bit of extra blue will be trimmed off all right i'm happy with this now and i'm going to go ahead and send it to the illustrator all right thank you guys very much this has been a tutorial on how to create a storyboard in canva for children's book authors to show a storyboard to their illustrator thank you very much you guys have a good day hope to see you soon bye [Music] you

Channel: Becky’s Graphic Design

Views: 113,799

Keywords: canva.com, canva, affiliate, story board, story, board, bored, free, cheap, easy, childrens book, picture, image, illustration, how to, make, illustrator, indesign, adobe, photoshop

Id: uKuDYEceGa4

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021