Children's Book Illustration

A picture book is an illustration project. The words are usually under a thousand; almost everything that makes the book work is visual.

We start with illustrator matching. Style matters enormously here and is not interchangeable — a warm watercolour world and a bold graphic one produce entirely different books from the same manuscript. You see portfolios and choose, rather than being assigned whoever is free.

Then character design. Before any spread is drawn, the illustrator produces character sheets: your protagonist from multiple angles, in several expressions and poses. This is the point to say the bear's face is not quite right, because changing it here costs a sketch and changing it later costs fourteen finished spreads.

Next the storyboard — the whole book as rough thumbnails. This is where the book's pacing is actually decided: what falls on which spread, where the page turns land, which moment gets a full bleed and which gets a quiet vignette. A read-aloud picture book lives on its page turns, and they are designed here.

Only then does finished art begin, spread by spread, with review points along the way. Because the schedule is the thing that most often goes wrong on illustration projects, revision rounds are defined up front and the project cannot drift indefinitely.

Illustration is quoted rather than priced from a list, because a 32-page picture book with a single character and a 48-page book with a crowded ensemble are not comparable pieces of work.