My Entire Children's Book Illustration Process

This is my full process for illustrating a children’s book from start to finish in procreate! If you’d like to see the video at a slower …

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hey everyone if you’ve ever wondered what the exact process of a children’s illustrator is when they’re doing a book that I’m excited to tell you that I recorded every single part of my drawing and painting process and I’m going to share that with you today since I’ve been illustrating books for Brands and self-published authors for like eight years I’ve had to develop a very streamlined process because of really tight deadlines most illustrators I’ve been told get like six months to a year and I’m used to getting like six weeks with a book that’s not even totally finished being written yet so I have a really straight line process that I’m going to share with you guys that you know it really just never steers me wrong so here are some of the books that I’ve Illustrated for Brands and I’ve also Illustrated and written in this book how to draw adorable which won three self-publishing Awards which is available down in my links below so that’s sort of where I’m coming from now let’s get to it before we start going through the actual drawing and painting video I want to talk about what I do before I even start drawing all right to get started you’re gonna need to know three things before you even start drawing the first one is you’re going to need the script with what the story is because you can’t illustrate anything without that and sometimes that comes with illustration notes and sometimes it does it next you’re going to need to know the page size so for example is this where is it rectangle is it a 6 sixth rectangle is it a 10 by 10 rectangle that way you can illustrate to the size but actually a bit bigger than the size in case anything needs to get shrunk down or moved but if you’re illustrating something for a square format and it’s rectangle you’re gonna be in trouble so know that before you get started and also finally how many pages the book is actually going to be so you know how many pages you have to illustrate for example most books are about 32 pages but I’ve done books that are much less like 12 to 20 and you’re going to want to know exactly how much room you have before you start once I have the information I like to take the script and separate it out by Pages what part of the story ends up on what page most people do this I think just by writing next to the script like this section is page one and this is page two but I actually like to lay it out because I had to because our timelines were so short I actually laid them out physically in InDesign or photoshop or something like that with the text so I know how much room the text is going to approximately take and I can sort of illustrate around that I don’t think most illustrators do this but I find it really valuable so it’s always been a part of my process I’ll show you what that looks like right now all right so let’s say I have this pretend script right here what I’m going to do is take it into another program like Adobe InDesign or photoshop or whatever you want to use to lay it out and I’m going to start placing the text throughout the story if you want to see how I make the document I’m going to go so file new document at this point I get to change this and choose my size so let’s say it’s a eight and a half by eight and a half book I know it’s going to be 32 pages and I can decide here the margins this is how far I want the stuff to stay inside I’ll show you that in a second point five is usually pretty good and I’m also going to choose the bleed which I’ll show you in a second at a quarter inch as well and it’s going to create my document and that’s the cover page and over here on these other Pages would be how I’m going to pull out the text usually you have a cover like inside cover and title page and then the story really begins over here and I’m gonna just copy and paste from my script the bits of text that I want and I’ll start laying out the story like this so the reason why I really like doing this first is I can choose to do stuff like on this page I want to split up the text to have two small illustrations and I can lay out the text and know exactly what that’s going to look like and then over here maybe I want it just to be a single illustration and the text is going to be on this side like here and then on the other side I’ll have another little bit of text but I I can go in here and put the parts of the story and sort of plan it out and this is helpful because often you’ll get to the end of the book and realize you don’t have enough room for your text so then I can go back here and move things around and be like okay well I have to actually combine these things and move stuff up because I don’t have enough space so this is the first part of my process I’m going to show you what the margins are so this Inner Line here are margins they let me know that I don’t want the text or anything important to go past this line because it could get cut off by the printer or just to be like too close to the edge it’s uncomfortable and then the second line here is the bleed so I actually need my illustration to extend all the way past this docket all the way to this Edge that way the printer when they cut they can cut a little bit more in and the illustration will be fine or they can cut a little bit off the other way and the illustration will still be fine so these are the marks that you’re going to want in there before you start and the other really important part is this line down the center of the book is the gutter and we call it that because if something goes in here it could get lost when the page is full because books don’t fold perfectly flat so make sure nothing important in your illustration Falls in this area or in these areas here all right the next part of my process I’m going to show you a different book that I did a thumbnails for because it shows spreads and I want to show you how I do that and you’ll see that I’ve sort of broken these up in very tiny thumbnails this is actually the size that they are and I’m figuring out what I want on each page so you for example I’m figuring out here that I want this to be a full page illustration but I want these ones to be two tiny illustrations on this page and I’ve kind of marked how I’m going to place a text with it here just really roughly and I’ll do the whole book like this every single page I’ll have figured out this is going to be a full page with two little spots is what we call this one it’s like little miniature ones in there that don’t go to the background this will be a full page spread I’m thinking about the gutter here making sure that it overlays okay and all that so that is the first step that I do I do these kind of roughs now for this book that I’m going to be showing you today it’s a little different because like I said it didn’t have spreads but I’ll go ahead and start playing and show you guys the process for that now I’m now gonna go and do some character designs of my two main characters the style of the book overall had this sort of 1940s Flair of it so I’m thinking about that both in the character design of the stuffed animal making look cute and unique and also with this little girl um it’s also wintertime because it’s a Christmas story so I wanted to be like bundled up a little bit and super cute so that’s what I’m going over here when I’m doing these rocks and then really quickly when I send my work to a client I always label it like this a little dog a and little dog B and the little girl if I had more girls I’d be a little girl ABC that way when they’re giving me feedback it’s really easy for them to pick something or tell me like use the ears from dog a but I like the polka dots on Doc B and I can combine them and it makes that conversation very simple your art directors and clients will appreciate it even if they don’t say anything about it I also just for myself did some of the older gentlemen in the story because I don’t draw um a lot of men so I wanted to do a little bit of practice before doing those drawings now the next step here is after I’ve done my thumbnails and I know exactly what texture is going to be on each page I’m now going to take each page and do a couple more concept sketches and think about each page and make sure that I really like the camera angle or what I’m showing in the story so I’m taking this one image of this part of the story where she’s talking to the shop owner to get this puppy and thinking about do I want to be looking at the girl do I want to be mostly singing the shop where do I want to close in on the storytelling what camera angles do I like I ended up going for something like this one because I really just like that moment of in the story the dog getting picked and I wanted to see the dog a little bit closer especially since in the first illustration of the book He’s farther away I’m gonna then do that for all of the other pages of the book to taking each page knowing what text that I want to have being on that page and explore different versions of it super close a little farther away maybe we see more of the Town Etc and at this stage I may end up shifting slightly where the text goes I may end up deciding to move some text to a different page but going through this process and already knowing basically what I want there and how much room I have to play with gets all figured out at this point in the storytelling one thing that you’ll notice is I’m labeling a lot of things as vignette and spot that’s just because I was working with a self-published author and I wanted him to know um what they were going to be because the price was different for those types of illustrations what I’m doing now is I’m going over my rough and I’m making it a little bit cleaner this will be the level of finish I’m going to share with a client I don’t expect anyone but myself to understand my super rough sketches but if I want approval from an art director or if I’m doing a book dummy or I’m working with a client I’m going to clean it up just a little bit more so it looks a bit more polished and understandable and send that to them so now I’m going through all of the sketches that I liked and cleaning them up just a little bit I’m going to show you what I actually sent to the client again he was paying uh based on whether or not something was a full page or like a spot or vignettes that’s why they’re laid out in this way usually I would have it laid out with a text but you can see here I have this is a level of finish that I am taking in the illustrations to some are a little bit cleaner than others but you get the idea that she’s buying the dog and there’s some bit of toy store behind there or it’s a toy store window and she’s looking at it and the dog is in the window like just key points keeping it sketchy but you definitely feel the emotion in these illustrations so the next part of my process is going to be clean line all right just to show you my file what I do is I put all my sketches into a file that is the correct size so I’m now working in correct sizes before I was just sketching on whatever I’ve scaled my sketch so that it works within the size that I’m being given and then I fade it down like this and then I’m going to take this and I’m going to draw over it now a common question is which order do illustrators work in like do they go from the first illustration to the second to the third and for me I often go linear but in this case this first illustration was really overwhelming for me because I don’t do a lot of background and like details and toys so I was not going to start there I decided to start with this illustration first and then move forward and actually do this one at the very end all right so now I’m going to take each illustration and go through them and do a cleaner path I still keep my line sort of loose and working a little quickly as I do my lines you’ll see I have my character design here next to the girl just so I am following my character design as I’m going through the cleans I’ll often paste it right next to each other so that I can compare the two one thing to notice on this one is if you look at her wrists there’s nothing on her wrist for clothing I just kept it by the shoulder but when I went to go do the next illustration I decided to close up on her wrist so I wanted to see it there on the illustration before so I’ll go back and make those illustrations match here I’m thinking about character design I don’t want to be 1940s but I wanted to look a little bit different than she did on the days before because it’s a new day and it’s Christmas but still look a little bit different than her sister to make sure that it’s not confusing which girl she is in these illustrations one tip for clothes is to make sure that you keep the legs like visible when you draw it and then just erase them after you’ve done the clothes over it it helps you sort of make sure that your character is standing up straight and all the folds are where they’re supposed to be but then you can just erase it and clean it up later on although I’m working from like one illustration over to the next I generally will go back and forth between Pages just to check for consistency so for example I changed the clothing design so I went back to Yellow illustrations to make it match here’s an example of when I was struggling with the illustrator so I went back to my roughs and did a new rough and then came over here and started to draw it again one thing that you’ll notice is I often do the characters more cleanly first before I do the background and that’s just for Burnout reasons if I did went through each illustration and did the backgrounds I would get burnt out so I go through and I did the characters and the backgrounds were there but sketchy and then I can go in and clean them up and add those details when I’m in the right headspace for it in that shown here but there’s often times during these points where I’m going in and adding details that I’m taking a break and looking at some references especially since this was supposed to be sort of 1940s I’m looking at 1940s toys or clothing or toy shops or buildings just to make that consistency as my reference even though it’s not shown here in my drawings all right these are What the clean line illustrations look like that I sent to the client for approval [Music] thank you foreign the cleans the client felt one of the illustration wasn’t quite matching the text so I came back and I did rough sketches and we just started this process from the beginning with these new illustrations I was suggesting having the pup look out through the Wicker here focusing just on the city or making the hole in the Wicker Basket the handle so we can see a little bit of both without a B2 is distracted and this is the one that we decided on so now that I have those approvals I have to clean up this one sketch that got changed send it to the client and then work on the color for everything else for this one I actually ended up putting a bit of color there just because I felt like it was hard to understand what was happening without having the color there first you also get a glimpse at me using some reference in here you’ll notice that I’ll put in the reference draw with it and then hide it and make edits to it so it doesn’t end up being exactly like the reference but the reference helps set it for me and get me most of the way there especially when drawing something really complex and perspective heavy like cars in a city stream so the first part of my color process is just putting down flat color combinations so deciding for example what color her dress is going to be is it going to be purple or blue and I’m doing every illustration with the flat color so that I can see if that color works with all of the pages after I’ve done that now I can go in and start adding texture and things like snow and I’ll also do an overlay of another color to unify it so on these I all on all of these I put a blue overlay so that if my color was too warm the blue overlay now makes it unified and all connected so throughout my palette feels cohesive throughout every illustration and I know a lot of illustrators actually create a palette for their book so it’d be you know the red that I’m using for the bricks would be in there the green for the tree her blue dress those would be the key colors that I am using throughout that I could copy all right so this is what my actual file looks like I have it set up in procreate and I am using the page assist here to help me with the pages it’s under here under canvas you can turn page assist on and it makes it so that instead of all these layers being separate it gives you this cool little way to flip through your layer so I have them grouped here so each time I go to a different one it takes me to a different page and that way I can flip back between pages and then I can open this up and usually at this point I just turn page assist off so it doesn’t get confused and then I’ll draw it within this layer and you can see I have it completely separated all of these things all within this one group which becomes my pages for my book usually what I do is I just have page assist on to like sort of look through it and flip through but I have a turned off while I’m drawing and the moment you’ve all been waiting for here are the final illustrations this became the cover with room for the text here the little toy scene [Music] thank you [Music] and that is our process for illustrating a children’s book from start to finish I hope you found it helpful feel free to leave questions down below if you have any and you can always get my book how to draw adorable for more tips or join me over on patreon where we’re doing monthly drawing challenges and I’d love to see you there bye foreign

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