Year: 2020

Bonjour !

We are soon going to talk about the vast and mysterious subject of finding clients as a children book illustrator. Before even searching for client you have to show them who you are. What you can do ? What is your artistic personality ?

I explain here how to build a children book portfolio and what to have to attract possible clients.

Show how you illustrate stories.

When you are an illustrator, the style is what is going to define who you are, and is why the client will be choosing you. Finding a style is not an easy thing. It often comes along the way for you to realize it was here all along! This also might need a post of its own. You might even find your style while building your children book portfolio. To help you find a style, find what you like which might also mean go to book shops and browse existing book to see what is being done in the children book industry. It’s always a good inspiration and a good way to know where you stand.

Build a children book portfolio.

If you don’t have a good body of recent work that fit the children’s literature profile, you will have to create pieces that show the kind of art you want to create. You can have a look at mine for exemple, I have a section dedicated to children book (Click here). I present a variety of illustrations showing characters and landscapes. Some of these illustrations were made especially to fit my portfolio before I had any actual children book clients. Other are actual client projects. Once you start having a few clients, your portfolio will be able to grow with these naturally.

Have a good variety of artwork and illustrations to show :

• Character designs : Create a variety of characters, young, old, animals, robots, humans of all shapes and forms that will be in your style and that will show that you can take on any type of characters.
• Illustrations of character interacting : you need to show that not only you know how to do characters but you also know how to make them move and give them life.
• Illustrations of characters in a landscape : a little bit of landscape is always welcome to show the settings of a story an showing that you know how to draw them is always very good!
• Illustrations that tells a story : try to give a little story to each and every illustration you do, for exemple in the following illustration the story is: “it’s morning and the dad and his daughter are getting ready for the day“. Adding a bit of background to your illustration always gives more interest to it.

Show you can manage a book project by doing one yourself !

Aside from the above listed elements it is good to show that you can illustrate a full book. To show you can bring a project to completion. It can be daunting at first. But it is also fully part of being a children book illustrator : taking on a project from beginning to end. I have planned a full article about that in the future. It’s not so scary when you split it into bite size tasks. Future clients needs to know they can trust their projects to come to completion with you. But since you don’t have a client yet you will have to find a story to illustrate your children book.

Illustrate a royalty free story

The best way to illustrate a story when you have no project yet is to create your own project. Picking a story from the classical and making it your own is a good idea. It can be motivating to work on a story you like with a total creative freedom. You will have only to answer to yourself which can be a blessing or a curse for some of us!

Collaborate with an author or friend to illustrate their story

Maybe you could take on the project with someone else. You can easily find authors that wish to have their story illustrated on writing Facebook groups for exemple. You will have to answer to them just like a client and it can be a real life training.

I need to add a little disclaimer on this option. Because as you might have guessed we are here talking about working for free with an author. Working for free is not something I would promote. But in this case, you are trying to build your portfolio.

This could also be an opportunity to go further and send the project to an editor. This is why I talk about collaboration. It needs to be clear from the start on both sides. The best way would be to establish some sort of contract with the author. The contract would establish your ownership over the illustration and the limitation of their use for non commercial purpose without your written agreement. This would allow your work to remain yours. The author would not be able to publish the book without you and vice versa.

I did collaborate with a student a few years ago to create a Blue Beard re-writing. I needed a project added to my portfolio. Here is how the project ended up, it was a good opportunity for both of us :

Illustrate your own story

This third option is also good if you are something of an author yourself. Writing your story is perfectly valid. It also mean that you will be responsible for yourself as well from the beginning to the end. It can be quite challenging but I’m sure that if you’ve picked this option that you are up to it.

The plus of this option is building your own story will build your children book portfolio in an even more personal and unique way. Creating a story you wrote will help develop your universe and show your personality with even more strength.

I like writing my own stories as you might have noticed with Radiant and my other comics. I did an exercise mixing classical stories and my own stories. The hare and the frogs is the result of that. It started as a portfolio piece, and is now a book that you can actually buy ! Yay !

I’ll need to do an article about that, I’m quite exited to show it to you.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and that it will help you build your children book portfolio. Comment if you have a question, are you planning on being a children book illustrator yourself ?

I am making a series on children book illustration, check out all the articles at the end of this one : link here.

And if you are a new illustrator or artist, here’s another excellent resource on the illustrator portfolio website to read.

Thank you for reading and see you next week!

Bonjour

This week in the blog I want to present you Shanita Allen‘s first self published book : Sleep tiny dreamer.

Shanita commissioned me to illustrate her story at the end of 2018. We collaborated on the creation of the book. I took care of illustrating her story and putting the book in shape so it could be published on Amazon on demand printing service : KDP.

Amazon is the most used self publishing platform. I will not talk about self publishing platforms on my articles, since I do not know every one of them. But I highly advise you this article if you want to know more about what is available.

How did the self published children book adventure started ?

I have been working for a few years in collaboration with Reedsy. I will talk about it further in a future blog post. Long story short, Reedsy in an online platform that links illustrators to authors that want to go down the self publishing road. This is how Shanita and I met. I liked the idea of her book and she liked the illustration style I proposed so we decided to work together.

The begining of the story.

Very early on we agreed that a watercolor style would be best for this sweet and gentle story. And after a few test the hero of the book, Ari, was here :

The story is around Ari and her dreams. It allows for a wide variation of colorful illustrations. The story gives hope and pushes kids to dream big. It’s a very uplifting story that I was really glad to give color too.

Sleep tiny dreamer is a self published book. It means that the author is not going though any publisher. Shanita took upon herself to take care of all the distribution and promotion of the book. On my side I was a little bit more than just an illustrator. I was also a graphic designer and took care of the layout of the book, placing in the illustrations and getting the files ready for printing.

I’m really happy about how the book turned out. I feel like in term of illustration, I hit a cornerstone in my style. Sleep tiny dreamer is the kind of children book I want to do. I am glad to work on the next one. I am even happier to share the process of this new self published children book with you all!

Follow me in the creation of the next book, click here to start with this article.

Let me share with you one last illustration of the book :

For the rest I highly advise you to go on Amazon and get the book for yourself!

There is also a coloring book available if you are feeling creative and want to color Ari.

Follow the author Shanita Allen on her adventure on instagram. She shares positive energy and goes to events to promote the book!

Thank you so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed having a look inside Sleep tiny dreamer. I hope you will follow the creating of the new book from Shanita and I !

See you next week 🙂

And in the meantime, did you see the other books I illustrated? Clic here to see more of my books!

Bonjour!

We are today going to talk about a new projet I have started. Do you remember on my article about my goals for 2020? I wanted to talk more about my work as a freelance illustrator. Turns out I am currently working on a client project. I think it is perfect to share with you my experience.

It is a children book that will be done in watercolors.

I am happy to say my author on this project agreed to participate in this blogging adventure. She is letting me share some insight on the creation of the book and also how we work together on this new children book.

During this series of blog posts I will show you the steps of creation of a children book.

I will show you how to illustrate a children’s book. I plan to present you the the steps I take. But I am also planning on sharing how I take care of the project management. This mean how I organize myself to finish a project on time. How I involve the author in the realization of the book. After all the author is the starting point of the book and at the beginning at least, knows his project way better than I do. Maybe if you too are doing a big project like this too, we can exchange and see were we can help each other.

A self published book.

A lot of the project I do are for clients that want to self published the book they wrote. It means that the process might be a little different than the work process with an editor. The first difference being that the person I answer to is the author and the author only. It allows for a very personal collaboration. I really love this kind of closeness to the author. I believe it helps get their vision closer to what they have imagined when writing the story. With an editor, aside from the author himself that is sometimes not involved, there is editors and art directors that will be here to help you and influence the project.

What book project are we going to create together?

The book we are going to create together is the following story of a book that is already out: Sleep tiny dreamer by Shanita Allen. Shanita came up to me a little bit more than a year ago. She contacted me through on Reedsy an online platform that links authors to illustrators. She had the dream of being a child book author. Her wish came true and now she’s ready to publish the second one and continue her dream. The story follows the same hero Ari and is in the same series.

A presentation of the previous book will be in a separate article. I will show pictures and talk about this first book.

I’ll be of course happy to share with you dear readers. If you have questions about the project I will be glad to answer.

Let’s work together on a children book ! Children book 101 :

I will list all the articles related to this project in this post so you can find them easily:

• Build a children book portfolio

I hope you are excited as I am about this project. Have a good week and see you next Saturday!

In the meantime did you see my redraw of an old painting on instagram?

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by IsaArne????Magikitty.inc???? (@isaarne.art)

Bonjour!

As you may or may not know my comic Radiant has been out for a few weeks already. If you ever missed it you can read it in english on Webtoon and Tapastic

Et pour vous Français ici même.

On the side of the publication I also wanted to show you how the creation of the comic was going. I have quite and advance on the pages that are being published, and these days I am working on coloring page 16. I won’t show you any of it yet since it would be a major spoil on the story but I can shop you a few steps of pages that have already been published. This way you will see how I go creating a panel of a comic page.

If you haven’t read it I’ll highly advise you to go read right now so there will be no surprise and spoils!

Behind the scenes: creating a panel of the comic Radiant

1/ The sketch

There is steps before getting such a sketch of the panel but I’m really sad to say even I have difficulties understanding those. I’ll be sure to show this step in more detail another time but it can be pretty abstract. In this sketch I try to have the anatomy, the features of the characters and the expression settled. It’s the last sketch before the inking. And even if there isn’t all the details I want to to be rather precise.

2/ Inking a panel

To ink a panel of comic, especially with Radiant I like to use some kind of calligraphy brush. It roughly looks like ” / ” this (a tilted line). For the 15 first pages of the comic I did everything with Adobe Photoshop but on the last page I moved to Clip studio paint. My process is exactly the same and the change of software has not much impacted on my workflow. Inking tends to rigidify a lively sketch but with time the inking will become more and more natural.

3/ Blocking color zones.

Just before moving to coloring a panel of comic, I like to “block my color zones”. It means that I will decide on what will go with what. I don’t do much zones actually. I like to separate the character from the background and on very rare occasion the background will be separated in 2 zones but I rarely go over that. Because 1 zone makes one layer, I’d rather have less layers and lighter files. In pPhotoshop especially if you use a lot of layers the software can lag and you don’t want to paint with a laggy computer. It’s honestly the worst. Clip studio paint almost never lags but I’ve kept the habit of making very few layers in my comic files.

Keep it light!

4/ Coloring a comic panel

When I decided what style to paint or Radiant I decided to go for a mix of efficiency and aesthetic. Since this is a comic and I had in mind a regular schedule or publication, I need to be able to paint a comic page every two weeks or every weeks. This is why I opted for this flat style with shadows made with the lasso tool.

The lasso tool allows for a quick turnaround when painting but also gives that very satisfying edge that I like. Radiant had kind of a soft look and to make the overall mood soft, I like to color my line with a corresponding color to the colors of the page.

Thank you I hope you liked creating a panel of my comic Radiant with me !

Don’t forget to go read it here on Webtoon and here on Tapastic I’d love to know if you liked the story and art!

Bonjour et bonne année! Like we say in France!

I hope your year will be joyous and plentiful. I have of course set a lot of goals to myself, but nothing too drastic, rather and goals like “no more sweets” I’m going to try to be gentle to myself and honestly I’d rather set myself artistic goals. It is the only goals I know I will truely follow.

Some of these goals for 2020 won’t surprise you.

I plan on talking more about my comic Radiant, and finishing the series this year. And I have also projects for this blog like talking more about what I do as a freelance illustrator, talk more about my current projects. Also show you some finished work and tutorials on how I do things.

I don’t know if you would be interested but if I can help 1 person it would definitely makes me happy.

It is a subject I love very much as a succulent addict myself and a nature lover.

I recently finished this one :

Did you set yourself artistic goals this year? What do want to achieve?

Don’t forget to be extra gentle with yourself.

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