When illustrating a kids book you may ask yourself: What’s the first thing you do? Can you start painting right away? How does a children’s illustrator begin a new book? Read on for a few answers…

Children’s book illustrators, like all artists, do not sit down at their desk and *poof* the perfect picture appears (I wish!) They don’t get it done in the hour before dinner, call it perfect, and enjoy the rest of the evening. No, we have to try and try and try again. This begins with creating thumbnails and rough drafts.

Grab a copy of “Maybe A Whale” over here to look at!

Thumbnails, aptly named, are tiny sketches that are extremely rough . Often they include stickmen, arrows, and a lot of erasing. But their purpose is to help us figure things out.

Because illustrating a children’s book means all the pictures are based on text, many of the answers are already given to the artist by the writer — but there are also many that are not, such as:

What is going to be on this page? How many characters? What is in the foreground and what is in the background? What about location? Time of day? Where is the text going to go and how can I make it stand out? Where should the composition lead the eye as the reader looks at the page and text? What about colors? And how do the colors effect the mood of the page?

These are just a few of the questions that get answered in thumbnails and then later in rough drawings. (It’s like having a little person or a four-year-old inside your head asking tons and tons of questions.)

Below are some of the thumbnails I sent to the publisher when we were first deciding on what each page would look like. A few of the colors are included, as I was working out a color palette for the book at the same time. They also have basic figure poses and props in each scene. (Most thumbnails are much more rough. These ones are secondary thumbnails I did to really flesh out composition and color.)

…and those changes are much easier to do in a thumbnail than a full-scale painting.

In the pages below, the text from the author talks about moon jellies and seals gliding past the kayak. But it does not tell me what perspective to use, colours to feature, or how to create an interesting composition on the page.

I had to try out a number of different variations (showing the scene from above, from the side…etc) before deciding this upwards-shot underwater version was the most interesting and magical choice.

I love underwater photography, especially when it captures the light on the surface of the water and the light streaming down through the depth of the sea.

Below you can see both the original rough sketch and the final artwork for this two-page spread. Although both look similar, there were a number of big changes that had to occur during the process from rough to final.

From the placement of the seals and jellies in the rough drawing above (left), I obviously assumed the text would go on the right hand page amid the jellies. I also assumed it could be white type.

Figuring out where to put text without hiding it, but also without breaking up an image too much, is a challenge in kids books. Just don’t leave it as the last consideration!

However, it turned out that the text had to be black, not white! This is because the publisher has a focus on international versions of the book and it’s a lot easier to change the text to another language when it is done in standard black print. (Which turned out to be super smart as ‘Maybe A Whale’ is being translated into a Korean version.)

Obviously, I appreciate that — but I did need to make some changes.

So, I moved the text to the opposite page and juggled the other elements in the picture as well. Even after doing that, I had to lighten up the left-hand page quite a bit to make sure the words showed up clearly. Then I focussed on high contrasting and deep-toned colors on the whole right-hand page.

Overall, the page design was better with these changes. I like the composition of the piece, the negative spaces, and I was able to better position the seals to guide the viewer’s eye around the two-page spread and into the page turn.

I want to mention that having all black text in a book that also has 90% night scenes was a bit of a challenge. I had to add a lot of light to some of the book’s scenes to allow for the text to be seen. However, I think ultimately it helped the entire design because otherwise those pages would have been much too dark. It really forced me to learn about adding light in unexpected places — because ultimately our eye is automatically drawn to light, not dark.

In “Mother Aspen” (another book I illustrated, written by Annette LeBox) I used the thumbnails to plan out the colors. You can see below, I put little swatches beside each one so that I could keep track of which colors were being used a lot and make sure to repeat them. (This helped with tying all the pages together.)

I talk more about this in my other article over here, “Planning the Color Palette in Your Children’s Books”.

Learn more about me as an illustrator or check out the kid’s books I’ve illustrated over on my website here.

Say hello over on BlueSky where I hang out quite a bit!