Little Taco Truck: Layouts

The first page of Tanya Valentine’s book, Little Taco Truck, features the line “In a busy corner of the big city, new buildings began to rise.”

Illustrated by Jorge Martin, the opening spread is a lovely wide shot that sets up the story and teases the main character as he rides to his favorite spot. For the animated book trailer, my goal is to keep the style as true to Martin’s original artwork – and the best approach was to draft it directly from his original files!

For this opening shot, I wanted a dynamic reveal that would synch story with music & pacing – this meant peeling the layers apart and creating some new art.

The construction-only background was tricky, since it meant inventing a layout from scratch that would look like it had been done by the hand of illustrator Jorge Martin.

The next step was separating the buildings so that they could appear one by one. This was fairly time consuming, since they were layered not by building, but by the kind of detail (line art, shadows, texture, colors)… so there were a few steps involved.

Finally, the addition of trucks and other characters required careful planning, since some of the elements would be later rigged for animation.

The final result can be seen in the animated trailer:

Little Taco Truck is a children’s picture book from author Tanya Valentine, with illustrations Jorge Martin, published by Penguin Random House and Schwartz & Wade. Available everywhere this April.