Creating Illustrations Yourself for Your Children’s Book

As I illustrate many of my own children’s books, I often get asked how I do this. So today, I’d love to share with you my own step-by-step process that I’ve developed over the years, so you too can see how you can go about illustrating your own children’s book. I’ll also show you the specific things I’m using and what works best for me and my types of children’s books.

By the end of this article, you’ll be able to:

• Decide whether or not illustrating your own children’s book is something you might be interested in doing yourself
• Know where to look for an illustrator, if you decide the DIY method on illustrating your own children’s book is not for you

But before we dive in, I’d like to mention and address three important things to consider:

1. Illustrating your own childrens’ book may prolong your book-creation process, especially if you don’t have much time to begin with.
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2. Please be honest with yourself! Not everyone is necessarily artistically inclined. And that is absolutely okay! But if you decide to illustrate your own beautiful story, you should have a certain skill level. After all, your illustrations are meant to visually enhance, underline and support your beautiful story.
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3. I’m not a professional illustrator, so there my be some steps professional illustrators would do differently, omit, or add. I’m sure we all have our own style that we’ve developed over the years. So please remember that I’m simply sharing what works for me and my children’s books.

Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book: What You Will Need

There are only a few things you’ll neeed to get started right away. And I will explain each in more detail below.

• Pencil + Eraser
• Paperclips 
• Sketchpad
• Ink Pen
• Light Table
• Graphic Software or App

1. Pencil + Eraser

Any pencil will do here. I usually use a regular #2 pencil to sketch out my individual illustrations. You do want to make sure you have a separate eraser, though – not the one at the end of your pencil. A soft eraser is best, to keep your sketches as clean and smudge-free as possible without damaging the paper after repeated erasing. I use the white version from Paper Mate, and it works quite well.

2. Paperclips

I use clips to hold my pieces of paper together during the tracing process (I explain what that is in a bit). You can use simple paperclips. I personally prefer using small paper clamps, because they are less likely to scratch or damage the paper.

3. Sketchpad

Here, you can go all out and get a professional sketchpad, or you can do it like me and simply use the paper you use for your printer. It doesn’t really matter, because we’ll digitize these illustrations later anyway! Just make sure to use truly white paper, and not cream or off-white, since this will make the illustration process harder once you have scanned your work into your computer.

4. Ink Pen

To trace your pencil sketches, you will want to use a black ink pen. You can buy a whole set of pens with different tip sizes. I personally use a dual brush pen, and it works great for this particular purpose.

5. Light Table

A portable and extremely slim illuminating pad is the perfect solution to help you with the tracing of your illustrations. But you can also do it old school and simply hold your paper against your window glass and trace it that way.

Alternatively, you can also take a large (larger than your piece of paper) and clear Tupperware box, turn it upside down, and put a flashlight or battery-operated tap light underneath it. I’ve used this method many times and it will definitely do the trick.

6. Graphic Software or App

That’s where all the magic happens. I personally use Autodesk Sketchbook to size my pages, insert my outlines, color my illustrations, and add my text layers. The simple version is absolutely free. But any software that can do that will do. Many people use Adobe’s programs to do the same. The reason I’m using Autodesk is because (1) I’ve been using it for ages, and (2) it’s a lot more affordable than Adobe.

Other Things You May Need When Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book

If you’re coloring your illustrations directly on your paper, you’ll also need some color markers. I love this Dual Marker Set right here, and this slighly more professional Hethrone Set right here. And if you’re usually using colored pencils, then I recommend this vibrant color set by Castle right here.

Your Options When Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book

At this point in the process, I already have my storyboard as described in my book How To Self-Publish A Children’s Book; so I know exactly what scene of my book each illustration will portray and the details that will be included.

There are two ways we can go about creating our illustrations. I’ve used both before, each serving a different purpose.

1. A-to-Z Illustration Method:

I call this method “A-to-Z Illustration Method” because this strategy has us creating our entire illustration on a single piece of paper before we scan it into our computer.

This means that we first sketch and outline our work, and then also color it directly on the paper itself. And then we scan our completed work into the computer.

To use this method properly, we will have to make sure to use the right orientation and dimensions for your paper, so that our completed illustration fits our chosen book size perfectly.

2. Separate-Illustrations Method:

When I work on my children’s books, I like to create the backgrounds and characters separately; meaning I create illustrations for the characters, and then completely separate ones for the background. The advantage here is that I can (re)use the background and the characters separately in other scenes as well. But don’t worry! I’ll show you what I mean in just a bit.

Step-by-Step Process When Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book

I’d like to go over two examples with you: One example where I sketched out an entire scene for my 5.2 x 8″ middle grade chapter book, and one example where I created the characters and the backgrounds separately for one of my books for 3-5 year olds.

Both examples were first sketched out by hand on a piece of paper, and then finished with my Autodesk Sketchbook program I mentioned earlier.

Example 1 – Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book:

(1) PENCIL DRAWING: For this vertical illustration, I decided to sketch out the entire scene before scanning it into the computer. I used a regular-sized white piece of paper. I knew that I would later have to trim off some of the edges to make the illustration fit my 5.2 x 8″ book, so I made sure not to have any important parts of the image toward the edges of the page.

(2) INKED OUTLINE: Once the sketch looks exactly how I want it to look, I put a second piece of paper on top of it, secure it with a clip or two, and, using a light table, I carefully trace the outlines with one of my ink pens. Note that with this particular example, I filled the entire page, and that I drew the outlines only. I didn’t fill in or shade any of the areas as of yet.

(3) COMPLETED: After completing the inking of the outline, I scan my illustration into the computer. I select the high quality, 300 DPI, black and white setting.

And once the illustration is digitized, I open it in my graphics software. Again, you can use whatever software you feel most comfortable with. I suggest, however, you use one that has a layer capability, as this will make things so much easier for you.

Layers are useful because they allow you to move and manipulate parts of an image. For example, I use a layer for the outline, and then create a separate layer for each object I’m coloring. Having a separate layer for the wall’s color, for example, allows me to change the color later on without affecting any of the other objects in the picture. How you handle this is of course up to you, but using lots and lots of separate layers has always served me well, and is one of the best advice I can give you when it comes to creating your own illustrations. 

Before starting to fill in the colors, I first increase the brightness of the entire image, and also increase the contrast settings. This helps to really bring out the outline, while making the background truly white, without any potential shading that may have occured during the scanning process. I also get rid of any small smudges or dark grains that may be visible, which are really just small dirt smudges from my scanner surface. I essentially clean up the entire layer before filling in all the colors. 

As you are now working on your illustrations, you will want to make sure of two really important things:

• Be sure you’re now using the right dimensions for your illustrations; meaning you will want to use the required dimensions of your chosen book size
• Be sure your program’s quality settings are set to 300 DPI. This will give you the best quality without going overboard file-size wise.

Example 2 – Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book:

(1) PENCIL DRAWING: For this particular children’s book, I decided to first sketch all my characters for each scene individually, including all their different poses and angles. I then also created each background scene separately. I do so for most of my children’s books, because I like being able to reuse my individual characters and background settings for different scenes, and using this illustration method allows me to do just that.

For this, the size of the paper doesn’t matter, but I usually use regular-sized white pieces of paper.

(2) INKED OUTLINE: Just like with the first example, I repeat the process of carefully inking each illustration’s outline. Again, I draw the outlines only and don’t fill in or shade any of the areas during this particular step.

(3) COMPLETED WITH BACKGROUND: After completing the inking of the outline, I scan my illustration into the computer. Here too, I’ll select the high quality, 300 DPI, black and white setting.

And once I digitized my illustration, I open it in my graphics software. Just as before, I first ‘clean up’ my outline illustration by increasing the brightness of the image, and also increasing the contrast settings. 

Once I have completed all the individual pieces (usually each as a separate file), I then go about ‘assembling’ my scenes by creating a new file. Here, I first create a layer-background by importing one of my backgrounds I created earlier. And then I add a new layer for each additional character I’m adding on top of that scene.   

This is what my entire spread of characters looked like for one of my children’s books. It may look like nothing but a bunch of random characters, and some rather sparse looking background images. And that’s because the actual pages won’t be created until I have combined my individual elements into an actual scene. 

Again, having a separate layer for each character gives me the freedom to move and resize them as needed without having to redo the entire illustration. 

And just as before, we’ll want to make sure of the following:

• Right dimensions, so your illustrations fit your chosen book orientation and size
• Setting of 300 DPI

Adding Your Text When Illustrating Your Own Children’s Book

All that is left for us to do now is add the text to our image.

Here, we have two different choices:

1. Text as part of the image
2. Text and image separate

If your text is going to be separate from your illustration, meaning your text will not be shown directly in an illustration itself, then you can simply skip the step that is about to follow.

If, however, you want to directly integrate your text into your illustration, we simply have to add a new (text) layer on top of your image. Here are two examples of how we can add text:

Having the text in the image itself makes formatting much easier, because we don’t have to worry about page breaks or font sizes.

You can use whatever font you want, and the text can go anywhere on the page, making it fun and engaging for little ones’ eyes.

Bear in mind, however, that this method does make editing the text a bit harder – any changes or corrections have to be made within the image itself.

PRO TIP

We want to make sure the text is easily readable on top of our illustration. To do so, you can either simply use bold fonts and colors that help your text stick out from the background, or you can add a box right below the text, and lower its opacity, so we can still see your illustrations below that box.

Letting Someone Else Create Your Illustrations

If you feel like you don’t want to do this alone, or simply won’t have the time, don’t worry! You can always commission professional and talented illustrators. Here are just a few excellent platforms where you can find the perfect illustrator for  your beautiful children’s book.

• Freelancer
• Upwork
• Instagram (follow me here to discover more talented illustrators)

You can also find them in children’s book specific social media groups:

• LinkedIn (artist and illustrator groups)
• Facebook (artist and illustrator groups)
• Goodreads groups
• DeviantArt

Conclusion

Be patient with yourself! Illustrating your own children’s book is not easy. If you’ve never done anything like this before, it is perfectly normal for it to take a couple of tries in order to get your illustrations to where you want them to be. But that’s okay!

Whatever route you end up taking, remember that this part of the creation process is meant to be fun. It’s where your book’s characters take shape visually for the very first time. It’s where they truly come to life. So I hope you take a moment to enjoy this creative step within your journey of becoming a children’s book author.

And if you feel you’d like further support with this illustration process (whether or not you end up illustrating your own children’s book and would like to take a look over my shoulder to see how I do it, or if you would like support with the hiring process of your very own illustrator), then you may find my Ideation & Illustration Perfected very helpful.

xo
~ Eevi

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