The idea

When I was done with the drawings for my picture book Amandina, my wonderful editor Neal Porter was wondering (being wonderful) if I had any idea for the next story. I did have a few, but at a very rough stage.
In Amandina, Neal especially liked this drawing:

So he told me: why don't you think of a story about a magical suitcase? I thought about it for a couple of weeks and then I went back to him with a manuscript and some quick sketches.

Neal liked what he saw and helped me shape it (here's one of his sophisticated visual suggestions).

After everything was set, I began working on the final drawings.

Thumbnails

These are the first few spreads in my thumbnail storyboard. The thumbnails are the very first thing I usually put down on paper, after I get an idea for a picture book. They are extremely useful to understand if an idea really has the potential to become a story and then a book. As you can see, the drawings are very small (each thumbnail is about too inches high) and really rough, to say the least. They're actually plain crappy. But they're good enough for me to have, for the first time, the whole story under my eyes. I usually don't show the storyboard to anybody.