Picture Book Illustration: Create Your Portfolio

1. Introduction: Are you ready to start building a picture book illustration portfolio that reflects your voice and attracts agents and art directors? In this class, you'll learn how to put together a children's book illustration portfolio, and you'll walk away with a clear understanding on what to include, why it matters, and how to pull it all together. We'll also briefly touch on what to do if you have multiple styles and where and how to present your portfolio. If you ever tried to put together your portfolio and felt overwhelmed, you're not alone. It can be analysis paralysis, even for seasoned illustrators to know what to include in their portfolios. Thankfully, you don't need dozens of complicated pieces, but rather a focused set of illustrations that demonstrate your storytelling skills and character consistency in your style. This class is designed for beginning and intermediate illustrators, beginning illustrators who want to create pieces with the portfolio in mind, for intermediate illustrators who are ready to put their portfolio together and start submissions. Hi. I'm Mika, and I'm a picture book author and illustrator, and I worked with publishers of all different sizes in the last kind of five to seven years. I've created both picture books and early reader graphic novels, and I'm really excited to jump into this class with you and get your portfolio ready for submissions. So if you are ready to set up your portfolio, let's jump in 2. Project Description: Welcome to the class. I am excited to start building your picture book Illustration portfolio with you. So in this class, we have kind of ten key points on what to include in your portfolio. We'll talk about different aspects and different items to including your portfolio. And for the class project, what I would like for you to do is create a collection or a portfolio of somewhere maybe five to ten pieces and include them on one page or in a gallery online, and then you can either take a screenshot of it or save that page and then upload that into the project gallery in this class. If you are in the earlier stages of working on a portfolio and you don't have a range of illustrations that are ready yet, what I would like for you to do is take some time and reflect on that list that we're going to be going through in the class and think about what kind of illustrations would work for you? What kind of books do you want to work on? What kind of illustrations would work for you for a portfolio, and then make some thumbnail sketches of the ideas that you're thinking. What you can do is upload those thumbnails into a project gallery. There's not really one correct way to share your portfolio in this class, and especially portfolios are living breathing things. They're constantly changing. As you're creating new illustrations, you're going to add new things to your portfolio and then take everything out. Consider this class as a great stepping stone and a starting point on putting that portfolio together and also if you have if you are going through that analysis paralysis and you can't figure out which pieces are the best ones or which ones to take out, to have a more clear and concise portfolio, then those kinds of things are also great to post either in the discussion section or in the project gallery. You can post ten pieces and ask, which one do you think is the weakest piece in this collection, and then people can give their feedback. And that will also help you see the work through other people's eyes and see which pieces are better to include in a portfolio and which ones are weaker. We are going to get right into our ten main points of what to include in a picture book portfolio and we will get into that in the next video. I'll see you there. 3. 10 Things To Include in Your Portfolio: Today, I wanted to talk a little bit about if you are just wanting to get into picture books, what you should consider putting into your portfolio. And I'll give you kind of ten points to think about and think of these ten points as being like a Vn diagram. Your ten the ten points don't have to be individual illustrations, but you can combine different points into similar illustrations. And so point number one is include illustrations with kids in them, and so have kids running around, jumping, doing all the fun kid things that they do. Um, if you like doing people, then I recommend that you can add other ages of people in your portfolio as well. So have some adults, maybe some teenagers, some older people, and then that way, you have a nice variety, but it's nice to have most of the characters in your illustrations be kids of the age that you want to illustrate too. My point number two kind of verges on point number one is illustrate or your portfolio should show things that you like to illustrate. And so if you don't like to illustrate cities or cards or machinery, then don't include a whole bunch of that in your portfolio. Personally, for me, I really like animals and nature. So almost all the pieces in my portfolio have some kind of nature scene. Almost all of them have animals. Not very many of them have people. I have some, but almost all of them feature animals of some kind. So illustrate what you want to do books about. Because the worst thing that could happen is an editor or an art director sees your piece, where you drew a truck or something like that, and then they contact you to do a whole book that is all about trucks and cars or something like that, and then you're stuck illustrating something that you don't care to illustrate. Point number three is include illustrations with some common animals in them. And so this might be pets, you know, cats and dogs, maybe bunny rabbits or hamsters. They could be forest animals, like bears and foxes. They could be jungle or farm animals, animals that you see in picture books a lot, and having some examples of those is great to have in your portfolio. Point number four, you want to include different formats of illustrations in your portfolio. So if you think about opening up a book, and there might be one illustration that's horizontal and that goes a full spread. So you want to include some horizontal illustrations with backgrounds in your portfolio, and then some of your book illustrations might just be one page and they might be vertical. So you want to include some vertical illustrations in your portfolio, and then also just some spot illustrations or vignettes where you have a little bit of background or no background at all, and you just see the character. And so including a variety of different kinds of illustrations is really beneficial to show that you can do all those different kinds of illustrations in your portfolio. Then point number five is try to include scenery that happens in different locations. So you can include scenes that show interior scenes like in a kitchen or in a living room. And that way you can showcase how you would, um, design an illustration like that, and then also include scenes that happen outside. They can be in the city or in a forest. And that way, you're showing a range of different illustrations that you can do. Point number six is show the same character in multiple illustrations. And so this will be so this will be kind of a series of illustrations, and you'll have the same character in at least three different illustrations, and that shows that you can draw a character consistently, and you want to have the character different pose in each one, make sure they're somehow active. So maybe one is showing them from straight on. Maybe in one of them, they're climbing over, and you're showing them from the side, and then maybe another one is a close up of them or something like that. And then also make sure that your character is showing different emotions. And then that way, you're really showcasing that you can have a character and draw it consistently moving and having different emotions in at least three different illustrations. And that just showcases that you can complete a full book and have your character be consistent throughout the whole thing and have your world building, have you know, all your backgrounds look similar in all the illustrations. Then for point number seven is show different emotions. And I touched on this a little bit earlier. Make sure you are showing different emotions. So not every character in every illustration that you have in your portfolio should be happy. You should show characters that are sad that are upset, or you can have, you know, two different characters in the illustration and one is sad and one is happy. And then that's immediately telling some kind of a story. And so just make sure that you're showing a range of emotions in your portfolio. And then alongside that for point number eight is show a lot of movement in your illustrations. And so you don't want to just show your characters with their arms hanging limply on their side, standing still. You want to show them running, jumping, with, you know, excited, think about how their emotions can be shown through um through their bodies. And so if somebody's running, are they running excitedly? Are they running angrily? Are they running afraid? How are they moving and how are the emotions being shown in your characters through their bodies? And so, again, show a lot of different movements and emotions in your portfolio. And then point number nine is showing off your storytelling capabilities. So, for example, when you're working on that series of three illustrations with the same character, what kind of a story can you tell between those three illustrations? But then also think about what kind of stories can your individual illustrations tell? And so a lot of the movement and emotion will come into play in that. So if you have a character that looks like they're upset, and let's say, they're in the living room and maybe, you know, it looks like they just fell off the side of the couch or something like that. And then think about what other elements you can put in that illustration to really push that storytelling. Could it be a different? Like, what time of the day is it? What other kind of props does your character have? You know, are they in, you know, are their clothes dirty? Is their knee scuffed? Are they Is their outfit doesn't match what they look you know, let's say, I don't know if it's a girl climbing in a tree, but then they're wearing, you know, a ball gown or a tutu or something like that. You know, adding those kinds of elements into your into your illustration will help with the storytelling, and it'll it'll create this whole you can create a whole story with just one illustration when you pay attention to the emotions and the props and the movement and all those things and create really dynamite single illustrations. And point number ten is less is more. And so as you are working on creating new illustrations and adding them into your portfolio, always go through your portfolio and make sure you're cutting out weaker pieces because your portfolio is only as good as the best piece in it. And so it's helpful to be in a critique group and get feedback from peers, or you can get a critique from professional Illustrator or from art directors or agents through SEBWI events, and like I do critiques or if you're in any kind of a community or Kidlt 411, you could ask there's an Illustrator group over there that you can ask feedback for, and sometimes it's helpful for other people to look at your work and let you know which pieces are the weaker, weakest ones. But it's good to develop that eye for yourself, too. And if you can put critique group together for yourself, then you start when you critique other people's works, you start noticing different things in your own work, and then it becomes easier to figure out which pieces are stronger and which pieces are weaker. In the next video, we'll talk a little bit more about the Venn diagram and how one illustration can fit under multiple categories. 4. Venn Diagram Illustrations: Okay, so I wanted to elaborate on the n diagram idea really quickly. So on this side, I've added all the ten different things that you can include in your portfolio, and this is just an example of one of the pieces that I've recently included in my portfolio. And so when you're thinking about pieces to include and there can technically be if you look online for things to include in a picture book portfolio, you can find an endless list of things. And instead of illustrating things all the things separately, think of them how they can go together. And so, you know, the way a venn diagram works is if you have spheres and they're overlapping, and so you'll have children, and then you'll have animals. Oh, let's say locations. And instead of one illustration, only showing animals, but you can think about how can one Illustration hit multiple things from your list? The part where everything overlaps, this should be the sweet spot for your illustration. Out of this list, what is this illustration catching? So we have children. We don't have people of different ages, but we are including children. Things that I like to illustrate. Yes, I like to do children, and I like to do outdoor scenes. We have an animal over here. We don't have any fish, but there's a little turtle over here. And then the different formats and locations, that would be, you know, if you're comparing your multiple multiple things. And for the location, when I looked at my portfolio, I realized I don't really have any underwater scenes or scenes with a lot of water, which is why I created this piece. I wanted to have a mermaid piece. And then that way, I was able to include kind of kids in it, and then I was able to include an underwater scene, and I intend to work in the future to add a couple of more underwater scenes with maybe some fish and some cute sea life in there, just to round out my portfolio with a little bit more of a variety of work in it. Then it doesn't show the same character in multiple different situations, but I could, for example, pick this character to be my main character. And then what I could do is do a couple more illustrations showing this character in different poses. And then that way, I could include that one in there. Then showing different emotions. This characters kind of happy. This one's kind of happy, and this one's kind of surprised, showing different movement. We've got this character going this way and then this one kind of reaching. And so they're all doing something a little bit different. We were showing this one in profile, and these ones more from kind of like a three quarter view. And then how am I telling a story each? So if you're doing series of pieces, those series of illustrations can tell a story, but also always make sure that your individual illustrations tell a story. And so how is this illustration telling a story? We've got obviously something going on with this little kid going somewhere with a backpack, and it's got a little turtle in it. We've got these two kids over here kind of reaching out. And so there's obviously, you know, something going on. With this illustration, and then we're in an underwater scene. And so you can kind of come up with a plot and a story just looking at this one single illustration alone. And then the point for the less is more, obviously, that is for deleting your weak illustrations from your portfolio, and so this one was just a piece that I added. And when I add things, I usually flip through my portfolio, look through it, and then what I'll do is if I add one or two new pieces, I'll see if there's any pieces that are weaker and I will remove those or just older and I'll remove those from my portfolio and only keep the best ones in there. But every time you're working on an illustration, try to hit as many of your ten different things in it, and that way, you'll have really strong pieces to add to your portfolio. The next video, we're going to talk about the tricky question about including multiple styles in your portfolio. 5. Multiple Styles: And the question of including multiple styles in a portfolio seems to pop up a lot when talking about putting portfolios together, especially with illustrators who are still a little bit more kind of earlier in their career. And I feel that you end up having a style the more you work. Many years ago, I felt that I had multiple styles because I would look at illustrations or I would look at picture books, and I'd be, Oh, I can do that style. And they were still my own illustrations. I wasn't copying anything, but I could emulate a style by looking at it. And it's easy to do one off pieces like this. But when you actually have to do a full book and you're doing 30 illustrations for it. All of a sudden, it doesn't it's not that easy to, you know, emulate a different style. Your style kind of develops naturally as you work in serial kind of work like that. The more work you do, the more of a style you end up having because there's going to be there's going to be ways that you are comfortable in drawing specific things. There's going to be ways that you like to draw buildings, the ways that you prefer to draw trees, characters, and you develop kind of shortcuts and things that are easy for you. And I feel like that's how your style develops over time. And when you're working on a full complete book and you have to have all the illustrations that are all that all go together. They look like they're from the same world. They all have to be drawn, painted, colored consistently. And so, like I said, it's easy to make those one off pieces that look a little bit different. But if you have not done so yet, think about putting together a whole picture book dummy and you can start with just sketching it all out. You can take I talk about this a lot in my other classes. You can take an existing story like Little Ren Riding hood or Hansel and Gretel, and come up storyboard it, come up with thumbnail sketches and sketch that whole thing out. And you don't necessarily it takes a lot of time to make full final illustrations. And so you don't necessarily have to do final illustrations for the whole book when you sketch all of those pages out or spreads out, and then you do a couple of full illustrations, really soon, you're going to figure out what you're comfortable with and what you're not comfortable with. Are you the kind of an illustrator who wants to have all the details all the time in every single illustration, or are you the kind of an illustrator who wants to have more simpler backgrounds or flatter colors or are you doing rendering everything very three dimensionally? And I feel like if you do this exercise a couple of times and you make a couple of picture book dummies, you will end up having a style. And I wanted to look at a couple of different examples. And so we're going to switch over to my screen. Okay. So first off, I'm going to share my own portfolio just to show you. And so I work in a couple of different media, so I don't do everything digital. And I also work in watercolor and pencil and gouache. And so to have those two, I have those kind of as two different sections on my website. And so this is the top part is my digital illustration, which I think is kind of stronger. It's more, I guess you could say commercial. And you can see all the pieces through here and you can see, I also have pieces that are from my graphic novel. And then if you scroll down, you'll see that this is my watercolor Illustration kind of section in this portfolio. And these are all different watercolor illustrations that I've done. And then if you actually go down, I've also made one book that is with printmaking Media, which was Wood engravings. And so I have a couple of examples of that book down at the bottom. So technically, I have three different sections. And you can see with this bottom section with the printmaking, it's kind of a different style than my other ones. But I would not include these different sections in your portfolio unless you have enough strong work to put in each one to demonstrate that you can do that consistently for a whole book. And so that's important. But if you look between, so you can so I have my watercolor pieces, and then I have my digital pieces. And those things are two different media, but they're not necessarily two different styles. Like, yes, when I apply my digital media, it's going to look different than my watercolor media because that is just I'm working in two different media, so they look different. But if you look at my color choices and if you look at, the way that I draw my characters and kind of lines and things like that, there's a lot of the same in both. And so you can still tell that it's done by the same artist, even though I'm working in different media. So it's not completely two different styles. It's just the same illustrator working in two different media. And so I wanted to just pull up a couple of other. I found I wanted to show This is an illustrator, Hadley Hooper, and I wanted to just show their style. And if you look over here, you can see, we have this book at home, and it has so she uses these kind of printmaking processes in her books. And with this book, you can see that there's some black outlines for the characters, but a lot of the items don't have outlines on it. But then if you look at some of the other ones, you can see that they're all not exactly the same style. For example, with this one, it looks a little bit more kind of digital. There's a lot more lines, but it still looks, you know, like the same illustrator. The color palette is a little bit different on this one. And so you can have slightly, you know, different projects that you're working on and different sets of illustrations in your portfolio. And so, see, this one looks a little bit different. Again, this one looks like it's a little bit more digital with the layering. With this one, it looks like maybe there's some kind of watercolor elements in it instead of all printmaking elements like this tree in the background looks like that was scanned in. Watercolor. And so she's also using these different kind of media and she's combining them digitally over here, but it all looks kind of cohesive. And if you were to ask her to illustrate a book for you, you could kind of expect as a publisher what you get from her. And then she also has a little bit of a different style down at the bottom over here. So a couple of different kind of things going on, but you can still kind of expect know what you can get from her if you hire her. And then just as a third example over here, I have this is directly from the Bright Agency website. Ben Mantle, his website was down for whatever reason. And so we'll just look at some of his illustrations over here. There's a couple of illustration agencies, and there's some online places where you can look at a bunch of illustrators and you can click over to their portfolios and see the type of work that they have in their portfolio. And this is a great way to look at what kinds of things you could be including in yours. And so what I wanted to just call your attention to in this portfolio is that you can see that there's some of the pieces where, like, this one looks like it's a middle grade cover that he's worked on. This one, Bunny's on the Bus is a picture book. And so he's got a little bit of a variety of audiences that he's worked for. So if you look at his character designs for the middle grade book, they're going to be a little bit different than the characters for the picture books. But in general, you can see it's still kind of same textures. The color palettes are still they all kind of look like they go together. There's a couple of other. This is a middle grade cover over here, and there's another one over here, and I wanted to show. So if you look at a lot of these, they have this kind of digital really pretty painterly style. But then there's this one. I wish I could get it bigger. But with this one, you can see, it's a little bit of a flatter. It's not as painterly. There's outlines, and then things are kind of flat in this illustration over here. And so there's some variety in the techniques you could say that he's using, but in general, it still all looks like the same illustrator's work. And so if you are thinking that you just have too many different styles, I would work on a couple of bigger projects where you need to create multiple illustrations for the projects and then see how your style starts emerging from there. And then from there, figure out what kind of pieces to highlight in your portfolio. In the next video, we'll talk about how to gauge where your illustration fits in the market and how to see if it's good enough to submit yet. 6. 9-Grid Exercise: A grid of nine is a little exercise that you can do to kind of figure out where your work and your skill lies in comparison to other illustrators that are already out. So for this exercise, what I want you to do is I want you to find nine other illustrators who work in a similar way then you who are already publishing picture books, who are already creating books for publishers. And so you can either look at illustrators, maybe who you follow online. If you can't think of any, then what I would recommend is going to the library and just flipping through books and seeing which illustrator's work kind of resonates with you, where you kind of think that you could kind of be at the same level as them. And so to get to the point, what I want you to do is find eight other illustrators work. And then I want you to take either snap a photo of it or if you can find their work on portfolios online, get a digital image, and I want you to arrange it in a nine by nine grid with your piece being in the middle, and then all these other illustrators works being around. And then be objective and compare your work to those nine illustrators who are already working and see how your work compares to theirs. I how's the color palette looking? How's your character sketch looking? How is your rendering looking? And do you think that your work is at the same level as the illustrators who are already working? If you feel like you're kind of at the same level, then I would say that you are ready to start submitting your portfolio. If you feel like your work is not quite up to par yet, you can also ask for friends or critique group or critique partners if they can give you some feedback and what they think. If you can figure out where your work is kind of lacking, are your color palettes not quite polished enough? Do you need to work on your character designs or is it just that your work doesn't look as finished as those other Illustrators works and kind of try to pinpoint if it's not quite at the same level yet, try to pinpoint where it is lacking and ask those critique partners what they think, where you think could improve. And then really work and you can rework the illustrations that you already have and rework that one kind of aspect of that and try to work so that the professional illustrators and your work is at the same level, and then, you know, you're ready to submit your portfolios when you get there. And here as an example, I've used one of my illustrations in the middle of the mermaids that I showed you earlier, and then I put eight other illustrator's work around it, and you can see how I've been influenced by all these different illustrators. I've looked at their color palettes. I've looked at the way that they render digitally. I've looked at their character designs, and I've taken bits and pieces and kind of made it my own style that I'm comfortable drawing. And so I can place my piece in the middle and feel fairly confident that, you know, my piece looks, you know, about at the same level as everybody else's around me. And then that way, I can tell that I've done a good job with this illustration. If you don't have a full illustration to post yet, you can even post your nine grid as one of your class projects for the gallery. And in the next video, we'll switch gears a little bit and talk about how and where and who to present your portfolio to. 7. How/Who/What to do with Your Portfolio: So in this video, I wanted to talk about what to do with your portfolio. You spent time. You've curated your portfolio. It looks gorgeous. It is ready to go. It's professional and clean and neat. But now you need somebody to send it to. And so let's talk about a couple of different ways to present your portfolio and then who to send it to. So the first thing to do with your portfolio is put it online. Have a website. And there are different places that you can do this. If you have an Adobe subscription, you can have a portfolio through them. There are websites like Behance, where you can upload a portfolio. But I would recommend anything where you can have your own domain name attached to it. And so, personally, I have my website through Squarespace, and I know a lot of other illustrators do, too. And some people use WIC. Personally, I would not recommend that one because I've just heard a lot of people have issues with it. But I would try to have some sort of a presence online where it's not on social media, where this is your space, where you put up your portfolio, you have a little about page. You have your contact information. And that way, if an art director or editor or an agent, somebody is interested in you, they have a place to come and find information about you and a way to contact you. So that's kind of the first place. Then the second place would be social media. I would not try to be on every single social media. I would pick maybe one or two of the ones that you feel more comfortable working with Instagram is one that a lot of illustrators are on and I've heard that a lot of art directors will use Twitter or X used to be one, but I think a lot of people publishing has moved away from Twitter or X, and I think Bluesky might be another option. I know there's several art directors there who are posting work and who are looking for illustrators. And then other places would be Behance or, you know, have your Adobe portfolio. There's Cara, which is very similar to Instagram. And you could even have a portfolio or, you know, Illustrator page on Facebook. And so there's a lot of different places. Personally, I also pin illustrations onto Pinterest. And so there's a lot of different places where you can include illustrations. And then that way, it's just easier to find you. And so on social media, there's an event called Kidlet Art Postcard that was started by Gina Perry a couple years ago, and it's gotten very big. It gets a lot of attention. And so it is a hash tag that you use. And every first Thursday of the month, picturebook Illustrators will post their brand new picture portfolio kind of a postcard, and it's just a single image with your information on it. This is what mine looks like, and art directors can search for the hash tag and then find you that way. And so I recommend just participating in that if you are posting online. And then that way, also, I like posting the images with my information on it because then your information is always going to be attached to the image instead of just posting an illustration. And also I usually if I do post illustrations, I also do include usually my name as a watermark or something in a corner somewhere so that if somebody saves it onto their desktop or something that they can tell whose illustration it is. So I recommend doing that. Several years ago, people would actually send physical postcards and some people still do create physical postcards that they send to art directors. But with that, the thing is they can be thrown out or they can be filed and never looked at again. There's an expense to print them and to ship them. So I don't know if that would be my first thing that I would jump into, but it is an option if you feel that you want to grab somebody's attention that way. In order to find submission information, if you are a member of SCBWI their website has a handbook that lists all publishers of children's books, and there's addresses in there. And you can also go look at books that you have, look at who the publisher is, and then go to the publisher website. And on the bottom, it will usually give you submission information on who to email. They usually have an email address that you send submissions to and directions on what they in the submissions. And usually in those submissions, if you're sending an email somewhere, you just type up a short little email that introduces yourself. Hi, my name is Mirka Hokkanen. I am a picture book Illustrator. And then you might want to say something a little bit about yourself. Usually, I'll say, I like to illustrate nature and animals, and you can say what media you use. So I work digitally, and then depending what the submission guidelines are, sometimes you can attach images to your submissions or sometimes they just want a link. So make sure you look at the submission information before you submit anything. Um, and then this is where your website portfolio comes into play where if you need to submit a link to something, instead of sending an Instagram link or a social media link, you're linking directly to your website portfolio. And if they do allow for actual submission images, what I would do is just size everything very, very small, maybe 100 and I would do 150 DPI, and maybe maximum 1,000 pixels wide, and you could either just send one illustration or you could send a collage of maybe, you know, a couple of different illustrations on per page. And then that way, you're just sending a very small attachment or an embedded image in your email submission that isn't going to clog anybody's email inbox. And so that way you can also directly send your portfolio to all these different publishers. Many publishers oh, I don't know the statistics, but I want to say at least half publishers have open submission policies where you can directly email them with your portfolio or your portfolio links. And then the last way to get in front of editors and agents would be through SCBWI events or other I know highlights. And there's some other people who do Kidlet events, and they will have editors or agents as faculty, and then you usually have an open submission policy afterwards, or you have an invitation to send something. And a lot of times during these events, there will be critique opportunities that are usually pretty affordable. The big SCBWI conference that happens in New York, usually in kind of January, February timeframe, they actually have an in person portfolio event because a lot of these publishers are in New York and the conference happens in New York. There's an opportunity to submit your actual physical portfolio. And they put all the portfolios on these long tables in a room, and then all the art directors from all the publishing houses and all the editors are invited. And many of them come, and they will come and in person flip through portfolios at the conference. And I know that several people it's not a magic bullet for everybody to get published, but I know of illustrators who have gotten work that way. So that is yet another way to get in front of publishers. And those are kind of the best ways of getting your work in front and seen four publishers and then the other avenue to go and so that's kind of going on your own. But if you're interested in working with an agent, there are also illustration agents and literary agents and illustration agents, the difference between the two. Illustration agents only work with illustrators, and a lot of times there fees are going to be higher. They can be up to 50% compared to a literary agent who also works with authors, but some agents will also represent just illustrators, and agents usually take around 15% or so of the fees. But what an agent will do for you is they do all that shopping around. And so you can still post online, and you can still approach publishers. But now you have a person who's in your corner and agents have direct relationships with publishing houses, and they will directly send your work. And so it takes a little bit of the work off of your plate. And publishers will come to agents with projects, especially if it's an illustration agency, publishers will go directly to illustration agency and see and find illustrators from there. And so you're able to get some work coming your way through agencies. But I feel like it's always good to be active yourself and have a good online presence because a lot of times those publishers and editors and agents, they will look at your portfolio, your personal spaces and see what you put out and how active you are and how you kind of engage online to kind of gauge if you would be a good person, reliable, you know, nice person to work with on a project together. And so for the next video, let's look at just a few examples of illustration portfolios. 8. Examples: In this video, let's look at some picture book illustration portfolio examples from professional Illustrators. I just wanted to show a couple of different examples from people who work in different styles and different ways that people have put up their portfolios. When we look at the portfolios, think, are you seeing lots of movement in there? Are you seeing lots of emotions in there? Are you seeing characters in different poses in there? Are you seeing animals and people and different ages and then aside from that, also analyze and kind of think about how is each portfolio specific to the person who has put it up? So, obviously, it's going to be in their style. But also look at most illustrators kind of have favorite color palettes that they use. There's a lot of blues. For example, for mine, I like a lot of kind of aqua blues and yellows and greens. And so there's a lot of those colors in my illustration. And then you can also kind of tell what that illustrator likes drawing. Like, do they like drawing quirky animals or do they like to draw people or, you know, are they drawing very natural looking things, or are they doing kind of very simplified drawings? And so when you're looking at the portfolios, you can kind of really break apart and see what that illustrator is about and how that portfolio is pulled together with the colors and the style and all those other elements. And then try to kind of emulate all that in your portfolios. And so first up over here, we have Mikaela God. And you can see she does these kind of watercolor. She's done even a Google front before, like the logo before. And you can see that she has this kind of a watercolor style, and you can see that she's got some picture books in her portfolio. There are vertical pieces. There's this kind of a circular piece. This is a spot illustration. And she's showing nature. She's showing different ages of people. And so looking at all the different things, she's showing people doing different things. They are not stiff, everybody's kind of moving. People shown from different places. And so I just wanted to show this one as a first example of things that one person has included in the illustration. And with this kind of Native American heritage that she has, you can see that she's included other illustrations that kind of fit into this portfolio in here, too, like this Raven on Wood and some of these other illustrations that she's added. And these could be like this toxic plants could be commission or a licensed piece that she's done for another company for something else, not necessarily picture book illustration. And instead of putting all these different pieces in different categories on her website, she's chosen to put everything together. But if you look at it as a whole, it all kind of goes pretty well together, and it shows kind of a nice, cohesive style that she has. Then we have Illustrator Emma Levy. And this is her picture book gallery. And instead of having everything kind of going down a page, she has chosen to do this kind of slideshow type of a thing where you have to click on each image to view it. Personally, I don't know if I would recommend this because it makes it cumbersome to look through a portfolio. But I could see because there's a lot of different types of illustrations over here, there's some spots, verticals. Like this one was very very kind of wide and horizontal, and sometimes illustrations don't sit really well if they are all those different sizes. And so in that sense, I could see that this would make sense to have all these different sized illustrations, sit nicely, and then an editor or an art director can kind of flip through here and pick the pieces to see. Then the next illustrator I have up over here is Abby Cushman, and you can see she has a gallery, and everything is in the shape of a square. And then when you click on it, you get the full illustration. So like this illustration that I just clicked on is really horizontal illustration, but you have to click into the illustration to actually see the full piece. And you can get a good sense of her illustrations just by looking at this gallery wall over here. So next we have Illustrator Chris Chatterton. And so here are some of the books that he's worked on at the very top. You can see the covers of all the books. And if you click on the book covers, and you can see a couple of different styles. And so you can see that these pieces that are these board books on the top, they're for a younger audience. So character designs are super cute. They're very kind of easy to read. There's dark outlines, which makes it easy to decipher the images. And there's not a lot of kind of modeling. The colors are very flat. And then when you kind of scroll down and these are his regular illustrations, they're a little bit more painterly and kind of not sketchy, but there's a little bit more texture to them compared to these pieces on the top. And if you click on one of these book covers, it'll show the information for the book and a picture from the inside of the book, and then it shows a couple of it. And then when you actually click, you can go back and then it takes you back to the gallery. If you don't click back, then you can kind of go back to the gallery this way. And go through. And I love the way this works, and it makes it fun to flip through the portfolio. Honestly, I don't know how to set this up myself. My is very much more of just a gallery similar to Abby Cushmans. The way that he has it set up is it's all the covers of his books. And you can obviously tell that he has done a ton of books. And unless you've done this many and have all this work to show, then you don't have to show the covers of the books. Show or you can include the covers in your portfolio, but also show individual illustrations. But he's got so much stuff that he is just putting covers, and then you can click on individual ones. But then he's done other things as well. And so he's included, there's this mug over here that he's designed. I think this is most likely a birthday card over here. He's got some character designs. And so then once we scroll past the actual books, then he has some kind of simpler, smaller illustrations. There's even a sketch over here. And so you can kind of get a bigger range. You can see Lord of the Rings over here. And he's got Harry Potter things and things that are maybe more for a middle grade audience. And so he's worked on a range of illustration projects from it looks like from board books to middle grade or so. And so that's just an example. And then just jumping over to mine really quick. I wanted to add one more footnote for this. And so when we looked at my portfolio earlier, we looked at digital pieces, and then there's the watercolor pieces. And then I showed these pieces over here at the end, that were the inout or the printmaking pieces. And I just wanted to say, because this is a very different style than my regular picture book style, this was one of the first books that I ever did. And the way that we pitched this because it was so different from picture book illustration is I actually do have a background in printmaking, and I have a printmaking portfolio. And so when we pitched for the books, we pitched with a lot of these prints that I've done. And so I had this background in printmaking, and I had a whole portfolio to then back up this book project. And they were able to trust me that I would be able to complete a complete picture book in that style because I did have a whole printmaking portfolio. And then compared between the other portfolios that we just looked at compared to mine, one thing that I decided that I wanted to do with my portfolio was show the full illustrations. And so, instead of mine being cropped and shown as a grid of squares, I wanted my illustrations to show as full illustrations. And so if you look at here, you can immediately see that some are vertical, some are spots, some are horizontal spreads, and you don't have to you can just scroll through my whole portfolio and see all the illustrations, and you don't have to click on each individual one to see the illustrations. And after we've looked at all these different portfolios, and you can go online and look up your favorite illustrators and see what their portfolios look like. This is a personal choice up to you. There is no right or wrong way to do this. And I know at least with Squarespace, it's a very easy. It's just you can toggle a button and it'll switch which way. And so it's easy to see if you like your illustration portfolio to look this way or that way and then figure out which one you want to do. In the next video, I'll just go over your options and choices and some ideas for your final project. 9. Class Project Thoughts: For your class project, I don't want you to stress over it too much. It can be very simple. If you did the exercise where you had the nine illustrators with your piece in the middle, that would be a great exercise to post in the project gallery. Or, like I said, if you're just starting out, you can make sketches of ideas for illustrations that you want to create. You could even include a color palette that you want to work with. If you already have pieces that you want to include in a portfolio, you can put them up on a website or put them up in a grid on a piece of paper, and then either save that or take a screenshot of it and post that in the project gallery. And as always, if you ever have questions about the class or if you have questions about your personal portfolio and you want some feedback, feel free to post that in the project gallery in the discussion section below, and other students and myself, we can weigh in with our opinions. And let's jump into the last video, and I'll share with you my final thoughts on the portfolios. 10. Final Thoughts: Putting a portfolio together can feel pretty daunting, but I hope that after this class, I've been able to put your mind at ease at least a little bit. When you incorporate those ten kind of steps or points and the idea of the VN diagram into your illustrations, you'll be able to create a really dynamic portfolio that's going to capture the interests of our directors and editors and agents. If you are brand new to picturebook Illustration and enjoyed this class, then I recommend that you check out my other picture book illustration classes as well. Um, I recommend starting with the reading for a research class, which gives you the tools to kind of break down picture books that have already been published and then use the knowledge to make your own work better. And then I have several other classes about character illustration, anthropomorphic characters, drawing consistently, picture book dummies and things like that. And so I hope that you'll join me in some of those classes as well. See all my classes, you can click on my name that's above over here or go to my website at ch.com. And if you enjoyed the class, I hope that you would take just a few seconds to review it. It doesn't take long at all. The place to review is just down below. You can give it stars. If you have time, you can write a short sentence. It really doesn't take more than a couple of seconds. Getting feedback is helpful for me to make future classes better, and then also for other students to see what others have thought about the class who took it before. You again for taking this class. I really look forward to seeing your posts in the project gallery, seeing your portfolios, and maybe your nine grids, and I look forward to seeing you in the next class. Bye.