The most fun part of the many, many parts of publishing a children's picture book is imagining the illustrations for each page and working with a talented artist who can bring that vision to life. I lucked out with the illustrator I hired on Fiverr - a talented artist with top reviews and lots of examples that showcased her work. I reached out and after a few exchanges, along with the incredible sample illustration she whipped up upon request, we were on our way. Hiring the right illustrator for your book is critical, but providing a detailed illustration brief that makes it clear what you as the author visualize for each spread is just as important. I researched this process in books like How to Self-Publish a Children's Book by Eevie Jones to learn how to provide the artist with guidelines for book size, number of pages, resolution, and other parts of the process. Here is what the first page of the illustration brief looked like: I also sent the illustrator the complete story so she could imagine scenes and understand the book. Below is what the illustrator came up with for sketch 2. She added in some pups which was perfection. Just about every morning I'd jump out of bed and fire up my computer to see what she drew up (she used the Procreate app to illustrate). Seeing what she came up with was truly my favorite part of the project. She really understood the story and what I was looking for, so there wasn't too much back and forth. We'd discuss minor tweaks and I provided direction around the characters - I wanted diverse children of all abilities in the pages, for example. Beyond that, I gave her the artistic license to interpret of the words of the story. After all the sketches we finalized, I chose a color palette. When the color was added, that's when the magic happened. Below is sketch 2 in full color. The last step of working with the illustrator was creating the book cover - and we all know how important a cover is. That's a whole other post in itself, but here's the finished front cover.
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AuthorHi, I'm Bridget Greene - a career journalist, children's book author, and a Mom from Rhode Island. ArchivesCategories
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