All the fans of children books know how pictures are important and powerful for a story. It is true that the tale needs to engage itself, but the concept of illustration that brings book into real life for young people. Artists who specialize in children’s book illustrations often fall in love with books that are illustrated at a young age and have chosen a career that can create the same spell and go through the generations. It is very interesting to draw children’s books, but you should keep in mind that in reality, they could be trickier than other forms of art.
In addition, children’s books illustrators for hire with strong abilities of drawing. There are several tools and programs that are used in children’s books illustrations.
- Traditional Tools
The traditional tools never went out of style, and there was a resurgence of art directors looking for an illustrator of children’s books with a unique style in traditional techniques. Those mentioned earlier in this article (gouache, watercolor, etc.) are good to learn. There are also pen and ink techniques and hand-drawn letters. Many illustrators of books for newly initiated children can take advantage of a variety of online portfolios to demonstrate their diverse work. Nevertheless, pay attention to the maxim of the old art director. Your wallet is as good as the worst! Ideally, you can show what you want to do.
- Adobe Creative Cloud
Professional art software is very expensive. Leaders in the industry’s king and heap are the Adobe Creative Cloud, which includes Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign. Previously, it was difficult to invest, but recently we switched to a subscription model and even offered discounts to students. This is undoubtedly the most valuable program for those who are interested in drawing children’s books.
- Procreate
Another alternative is Procreate for iPad, which offers a large number of brushes and rich textures faithfully imitating traditional analog methods. Unlike real pencils and paper, it allows you to erase, resize, rotate, duplicate, and copy your work immediately, allowing efficient workflow and much less curse. This is useful for illustrators of children’s books because there are many changes and adjustments that often have to be made. You can go back to a project and resume where you left off without having to install or dismantle tons of art supplies. Although it is digital, the end result is a beautiful picture of children’s books set at print resolution.
- Inkscape
Inkscape is a free version of Abobe Illustrator and offers many of the same features as professional software. It is based on easy-to-use vectors, but the benefit of vector illustration is that it can scale to any size while maintaining quality or integrity.
If an individual is aiming for traditional media and naturalism by using watercolor, acrylics, pastels, gouache and or oil. It is a great idea to take some classes in several techniques. Then do not require any program or any fine art degree, but always follow formal instructions.
Currently, the combination of traditional arts education, graphic design, and computer technology is useful because of today’s illustrations for modern children’s books are mostly done digitally using design and drawing software. Finally, being a successful illustrator of children’s books is more dependent on the advantages of the online portfolio than the type of education received. There are a lot of inspirational children’s books authors who have been self-taught or have little formal instruction. Many publishers of children’s books have no complaints about hiring artists who have not had extensive experience.
As far as the role of an illustrator, it may surprise to learn that the illustrator and author of a children’s book are often matched with the published that is never meet. The children’s book illustrator is commonly brought into the projects when the story is fully complete. An ambitious illustrator of children’s book should consider joining the community of children’s book illustrator and writers as well. They have a great wealth of resources and several educational programs.
