Picture Book Illustration: Reading for Research

1. Introduction to Reading for Reference: Hi guys. I want to help you to create a successful portfolio and children's book illustration. People asked me constantly what advice I would give to new illustrators. And usually the piece of advice that I give out is to read a lot of books. It's always surprising to me that a lot of new illustrators, especially if they don't have kids, don't read a lot of children's books. The reason why it's important to read lots of children's books is because that gives you an idea of what the current marketplace is looking for, an illustration. And after this class, you will also know how to research that stack of books to use as references to make your own illustration portfolio better. I'm miracle hawk going in and I'm a picture book author and an illustrator. And I worked with publishers big and small for the last five years. I've created a range of books from picture books, two graphic novels, and nonfiction. And I love the world of children's illustration, and I want to teach you what I've learned. So grab some paper and a pencil and let's go. 2. Class Project: A lot of illustrators don't realize what a goldmine they're missing in already published books. A book that has already come out and unpublished has been vetted by a team of professionals, by editors, by art directors, by marketing and accounting, and by the main publisher themselves. And so when the book comes out, if it has already been kinda deemed to be a success. In this class, we're going to learn how to take The books that are published and use them as a resource to learn. Composition, color, storytelling, Character Design, pacing, value, texts, setting, and basically any other illustration skills that you need improving on. So depending on what skill you want to improve on at any given time or what project you're working on and you're looking or feedback for. When you're doing this research, it is helpful to only really concentrate on one specific area. I've included this handout as a part of the class. And in this handout, There's always kind of general things that you want to jot down first before you start taking the more specific nouns. Japan. So you would jot down the title of the book, the author and the illustrator. It's usually helpful to have a publisher and a publishing date on there too. And then I usually jot down the plot in a sentence or two on the very beginning and in the space that's on the side, you can either sketch the cover or if you're working digitally, you can copy and paste the cover. Or you could even print out a small thumbnail of the cover and then glue it down over here. And then on the bottom you have some room to jot down your other thoughts on the book. So e.g. if I'm trying to get better at drawing backgrounds, I don't know why I like background in this book and maybe even sketch some of the favorite pages underneath for reference. Then I'd find another bunch of books that I also liked the backgrounds and make my notes. And then in the end, I tried to look for similarities in all the books that I researched. What was it that caught my eye? Was the colors and tones for the layout or something else that intrigued me. If you have a favorite, you can even make a master study of it. Are trying to make your own illustration with what you have learned. Now that we have a basic sense of what we're going to be doing in this class. Let's go over where we can find books for research. 3. Finding Books: The cheapest and easiest place to find books for research is going to be at your local library. But no matter where you're looking for books for research, one of the important things is to try to look for books that have been published in the last about three to five years. Three years or three years or less, if you can make it possible. And the reason for that is that it takes several years to illustrate a picture book. And so a book that maybe came out three years ago could have been illustrated three years earlier before that. And so it could really be a six-year-old book when they illustrated, illustrations were started for the book. And so that's why it's important to try to pick more recent ones. So that way you know that that's the illustration style that's currently being picked up. Illustration styles move with the times. And so if you're trying to get your costs on current publishing, then it's better to look at more recent books than older ones. My second go-to places, our bookstores, and they're great because they will often have the most recent books up for sale. Because the library, they might not always by the most recent ones. But at bookstores you're able to go and flip through books. And you can thumb through and make notes on illustrators that you might like, or authors or even publishers. The bad thing is that you can't sit down at a library and read through a ton of books, but at least you can make some notes. And then if you find one book that you really like, maybe it's one that you have the budget to purchase. Or then you can at least try to look it up online and see if you can find out more about it. So if the book has been around a little bit longer, maybe for a year or two or three years, then you can oftentimes find it cheaper. Online marketplaces. Online marketplaces that I use are ebay, Amazon, and brick books, but there are many others depending on what country that you live that you might be able to look at. I always check those online sites when I'm looking to add new books to my collection. And then also I go to a lot of thrift stores because you can oftentimes find some nice books over there for really cheap too. So if you live in a remote location or somewhere international and you don't have access to bookstores or libraries in your area, then I would recommend doing some online research. Some other places where you can also look online is if you go to Amazon and you can have top 100 book lists. And then for other booksellers like Powell's or Barnes and Noble. And you can look at their online marketplaces and see what they have for sale. And then a lot of times if a book has been out for awhile, there will also be a read aloud for it, e.g. on YouTube. It's a place where often search and you can find the Read allows are great because you can usually see each page on there and you can make notes as the person is reading it. And it's a bit slower to do research this way, but it's still a good way if you can't get to a bookstore otherwise. So the online read alouds are great if you are looking for things like pacing or how the pages lead from one illustration to another as you turn the pages. But then if you are just trying to research color or composition maybe, or backgrounds that don't require you to see many consecutive, consecutive illustrations in a book. Then you could also look on the illustrators website or on Pinterest. Just do a Google search and see what other illustrations by that Illustrator you can find. If you have a favorite illustrator or Illustrator illustration style, then I also have a Pinterest, multiple Pinterest walls where I collect different kinds of illustrations for inspiration to use later. Lastly, I recommend signing up for the Publishers Weekly children's bookshelf email newsletter. And you can find that link on their website. It's free. And they will send you e-mails of upcoming books and publishers will promote their upcoming books that they think are doing the best. And so that is also a great way to stay in touch with current market in children's, children's books. And then also, they will also send you e-mails the words that have been given, like in February, it's ALA season, which are big library awards that are awarded in America like the Kallikak and the Geisler ward and things like that. And so it's great to be on top of what is the current events and publishing are as well. So I encourage you to sign up for that too. Alright, so now in the next video, let's look at how to narrow your research into the type of work that you want to illustrate. 4. Book Categories, Part 1: So there are general categories of books, like picture books, chapter books, YA, middle grade nonfiction. And all these categories have different styles. And so knowing what the different styles are for the different categories of books will help you figure out either what kind of work to create to fit that specific category that you're looking for work in. So you know, you want to illustrate picture books, then you should be researching picture books. Or if you have a lot of work that already exists than knowing which categories of books have, what kind of illustration will help you then determine which category your existing illustrations bit, and then what to do more to round out your portfolio for that category. So let's look at what these categories are. Alright? So as a caveat before we start looking at our books more closely, you'll find that there's always outliers and odd books published that defined categorization. But in general, this is how books are organized. And I've collected a variety of books over the years. And so I'm going to show you some of my favorites in each category and the ones that I brought from the library. We're going to go by age. And so the first category is board books, and these are for around zero to two years of age. And if we look at these books, you can see that the illustrations are really colorful. The characters are really cute. This one's got some flaps. Maybe a little bit more of an unconventional color palette. And so everything that illustrations are fairly simple. They're colorful, they're easy to read. This one's a little bit older, older kit, older in the board book range. Here, this is where it's also the themes if you happen to be also writing the themes for board books are, are, are also simpler. Let's look at just a few more. Just so you get an idea for word books. So if you like doing these really cute, bright illustrations, ford books might be something that you want to look at. And you can obviously illustrate in more than one style or more than one category. You can illustrate for both. E.g. picture books and important books. Start. This one's from the library. This one's a little bit more of a painterly style, but just really fun illustrations. We'll look at it just a few more and then we'll switch to the next group. And this is a non-fiction book, nonfiction, meaning that, you know, it's true, true stories or facts. And then this one is also for a little bit slightly older, the illustrations that are a little bit more busy, but we've got these really fun cutouts and some flaps in this book to this one, just the book opens. And then look, let's look at our next category, which is the picture books. And they are usually for around three to five years old. Alright, so next let's look at some picture books. The great thing about picture books is they come in a huge variety in so many different styles. And if you just kinda pay attention to what there is out there right now and what is selling, then you can figure out where your work fits in with everybody else's work. And so picture books are usually meant to be read to child by the parent. In general, the illustrations are still kinda cute and colorful. And in general, the illustration is primarily, primarily tell some story. And so just because I've talked about all the different styles, we are going to look at a whole bunch of books kind of quickly just to go over some different styles of illustration that there's just so many things out there. And so first I just wanted to show some painterly things. And so this is very graphic outlines and it's acrylic painting. And then we have some, a little bit more mixed media. This is paint and pencils. And then we have, I'm not sure if it's acrylic or oil paints, but painting. Then we have some watercolor books. Some more watercolor book. Scott Campbell, Molly Idle also does watercolors. Rather beautiful. And then we have books that utilize printmaking techniques. I only have two. I have a whole bunch over there, but there's only so much room. This is one of the books that I've done. Then we've got books that use kind of scratchy outlines and drawing faced with a little bit of watercolor. This is Oliver Jefferson. He also uses those kinds of drawn lines. Then we have pencil drawings, colored pencils. They have this great grainy quality to him. This is pencil outlines and a little bit of pencil coloring, and then it's been digitally colored. And then we have inks. And then really heavy outlines That's digitally colored. And then we even have collaged paper. And there's all kinds of mixed media work out there. Then you can also think when you're illustrating, you can think about limited color palettes and different types of printing. So these are just some examples. And just as far as style, you can have more of a kind of a simple style. Some of those pain, all these styles were more detailed. These are all more simpler styles of illustrating. Usually for younger kids, you can go a little bit more cartoony. And cartoony usually is a little bit more expressive. Where you can go really sweet and kind of whimsical with your illustrations. I love this country. It's great if you like illustrating people. There are lots of books with opportunities to illustrate people differently. Or if you're like me and you don't care for, for people too much. You can also do a lot of animals. So you can tell this just for a little bit younger. For perhaps a little bit older. This is one of my books, just animals. Some watercolor cats, digitally drawn alligators. And if you don't care for that, there's even illustrators who illustrate vegetables and fruit. So there's a lot of opportunities out there for you. You just have to, you just have to find your style. But if you kinda look at all these, these books that we've been looking at, the style is very, I'm appealing to children. And so one of the important things, and figuring out your style is coming up with characters that are visually appealing to children. So next, let's look at, next, let's look at middle grade books and chapter books for a little bit. Older kids. Alright, So then we get to the age of kids where they start reading on their own. So that's about six years and up. And kids of that age still will read picture books. And usually notice that the illustrations are a little bit more refined than for the younger kids. And then we also get into chapter books and kinda early reader graphic novels. And so I wanted to show some of those bursts. And I've lumped the early readers and graphic novels together. So we'll look at for the younger audience first. So this is just the learn from the, learn to read series. And in general, the text for these is kind of short, but you can see just look at the illustrations. This is even slightly maybe younger, very simple illustrations on this one. And we're starting to get a little bit more text on that one. And so most of these are meant for the child to read on their own without a parent. This is a comic and the difference between a comic book or a graphic novel and the picture book obviously is in graphic novels will have multiple panels per page. So that's how you can tell the difference or, or you know which one I'm talking about. So a lot of them geared for the younger kids will have these very simple illustrations. There's even a mixture of things over here. The graphic novel, I've done a graphic novel for holiday house, that's an early reader. So there's very little text in here. This is geared for kids aged little bit younger who are just learning to read and just one more in that category. That was a lot of books for younger kids. Now in the next video, let's look at some books for older ones. 5. Book Categories, Part 2: And so these ones are for a little bit older. And you'll see these ones still have a lot of illustrations. A lot of times, if they're these chapter books that illustrations might start being black and white or grayscale on the inside, but there's still a decent amount of illustrations in here. Let's see. Princess in black is another great example. They are actually printed in color. So there's quite a lot of text in here, but there's still a lot of pictures. And then Joanna most Tilton series is kind of in-between hybrid version where I'm a little bit similar to the princess in Blackboard. There's quite a lot of illustrations in these books two. Then this is Clyde. You can, this book is about this angry bear. So it's a little bit for older kids, a little bit more text in here. And then we have this book of Wizard of Oz. It's little bit thicker, but we still get really nice illustrations, which then encourages the kids to go through and read the book to see the illustration is coming up. And then lastly, I wanted to look just for a little bit older kids. You can see as we're going through these categories, the illustration is how they start getting more busy. There's more texts, the texts, it a lot smaller, a lot more illustration. So the reader has to work a little bit harder to understand the context or content of these books. But still a lot of variety, variety in the books that we get. And so this is obviously if you really like cartoons, you can find work illustrating your favorite comics. These illustrations. And we get a little bit older and we just have our grayscale illustrations on the inside. Also for this one, a little bit more realistic, more rendered, whereas the other ones were a little bit more cartoony and simple. Then the last one, this is kind of in-between. See if we can find a little bit less illustrations in this one. These ones are kind of painterly, very lot of grayscale and these ones. But I really find knockout character sketches in this one. So if you really like drawing characters in the beginning, they get introduced to a lot of the characters in the story. So it really fun opportunities for this one. Alright, so then we get to the middle book section where we get the longer books, we get popularity series. This is around ages nine to 12. And some of those books we just read would also kind of interests kids this age. But now we get to more black and white interior art and there's going to be less of it. And a lot of times we'll just get a colored cover. And also if you've looked at the age of the characters in the illustrations, as we get to older books, the, the age of the characters also gets older in the books. And I'm also a plot lines if you're looking for themes to illustrate some of the plots, you know, a lot of common themes in this kind of category of book are e.g. a. Sibling rivalry, fitting in with friends or becoming attracted to others. And so you'll just see, I'll just show a few illustrations here. So getting more black and white, a little bit less illustrations. Just the few illustrations from here. And so this just gives you some idea of what these are still for, you know, kinda middle school age kids. I'm not sure if this one didn't have some. There were more kind of ink washes. You can see I'm not sure if there's any in here. So this one doesn't have any pictures on the inside, but it has a really nice color cover. We have the neat series, and this is a graphic novel, but this is, you can tell it's kind of a cartoony style and they're kind of middle-school age in this book. And then this one is actually nonfiction. And so it actually tell us about, you know, about bees. Let me see the warriors. The series is a pretty popular currently. Here we go. Okay. And they have both a chapter book series and a graphic. They've been turned into graphic novels as well. Then here's just another graphic novel for older kids. Just letting it focus. So just as we get to the older kids, we also get more complex storylines. And this is a really nicely illustrated are freely, really thick book. So for older kids, I can find any of the illustration. So these are kind of ink and ink washes. And there's a few colored panels on different kind of a slicker paper in-between. Okay, then, so these ones, the kind of older books, as we start getting to the older kids, you know, like really thick books like this. And also the characters start becoming older in this book. You get to the young adult section and they're usually about 13 to 18 years. And the topic start arranging a little bit wider. They also could be historical, crime or romance. And then the topics also kinda speak about experiences of the readers. And then lastly, let's look at non-fiction really quick. All right, Lastly, I just wanted to do a really quick segment on non-fiction. Non-fiction can go to any age range, but you have to obviously be more careful with accurate representation. But there can be a wide range of subjects from politics, art, nature, science biographies. And then you just illustrate appropriately to the age of the kid that the book is meant for. Okay, alright, so let's look at just a few of these books to get some ideas. And so we have, there's some non-fiction books about nature and animals. And so if you love drawing more realistic things than this might be. You might think about non-fiction as well. There's a watercolor illustration, so there can be a range of illustrations that you're doing for nonfiction on these are simpler, were younger facts for younger kids. And if you're really liked doing non-fiction, just make sure a lot of it will involve a lot of research. And there will be people who are going to scrutinize your work to make sure that it's accurate. And so these are just a few of the biographies for different ages that I picked up. So we have for older kids and it's in graphic novel, black and white format. And then we have a really cute colorful picture book with some pretty illustrations that are painted. And then another digitally illustrated biography of Bob Ross. And then another one that's also just been painted with watercolors and inks. And so there's a lot of, lot of room over there. And then lastly, I just wanted to show some history politics. We have the next president that's illustrated by Adam Rex. And so they are very detailed kind of acrylic or I'm not sure what kind of paintings but paintings. And then in a totally opposite way, this is for younger kids. These are paper or cut paper collage is, and it tells the story about the Statue of Liberty. And so very different illustration style, but still nonfiction. And then this is about women's history. And so it's kinda this collage style of illustrating over here. Some paintings and some digital work intermixed together. And so there's a variety of opportunities in non-fiction books too. And so if you really like drawing portraits of people or realistic representations of animals, you can put a whole portfolio together just geared towards nonfiction work as well. I think just the most important thing when you're illustrating is just being aware of the age that you're illustrating for and then making sure that the style is appropriate for that age group. Now that we know all the different categories for research and what shelf to look on. Let's delve a little bit deeper into our research. 6. What to look For: Okay, so now that we know all the different categories of books, Let's start honing down on what to look for when you are researching to become a better illustrator yourself. If you are a brand new Illustrator and you are just kinda figuring things out, I would encourage you just to try to get yourself to a library or a bookstore and just browse a lot of just look through a bunch of books. You don't have to read them whole lot, lot, but just pick up books and kinda flip through the pages and see what the illustrations look like. It looks like. And then as you're browsing through the books, keep a little notebook with you and mark down what is catching your eye. What is, what is, what is interesting to you? And also, how would you relate your artwork to what you're looking at? And so you can start looking at, are you drawn to specific colors or are you drawn to specific type of like the way that the characters are illustrated to you, like the books with Animals in them or the people. And just kinda start keeping track of that and start noting down who your favorite authors are. And also, if you start noticing that a lot of the books that you'd like all come from the same publisher. That might be something to note too. And it might be a good idea to go to that publisher website and look at what the list of books that they have up for sale too is. That way as you figure out what you're drawn to, hopefully you can start narrowing down some ideas on what you would like to illustrate as well. So if you're a little bit further down the road and you already have a direction in the style of the way that you'd like to illustrate, then it's a great idea to start looking at books a little bit more specifically in, and pick one thing that you want to improve on. And then look for books for two reference how to do that specific thing. Okay, So these are some of the things that you might look for when you are researching other books. Composition. Composition is the way that all the different elements of the artwork are combined or arranged on the page. And having a good composition gives us visual organizations so we know what thing to look at first and second. In third, and it helps us arrange or visual space on the page. So character design, elements that give the character personality and expression and shape. And so e.g. if you're trying to do it drop people, you might look at a whole bunch of different illustrators who have done different person characters are human characters and just see how they drawn them and see if there's one way that really relates to you. And then you can kind of get some ideas on how they draw people and then use that for your own art. Then another thing that I might research is backgrounds. And backgrounds are the space the characters move around in. So we have the main character and then we have the background. Some of them might be bright, sometimes it might be white. E.g. in this picture it's mostly just black. And so sometimes I'll research how to draw different forests and what kind of angles other artists are going for. Then another thing that you could research is color. And so obviously, when we looked at all the different picture books in the previous segment, you saw that some of them had very limited color palettes. This one is a very muted color palette. Some color palettes are very bright. So when you're thinking about the kind of style that you want to illustrate in looking for ideas for color palettes is also something that you might look from other books. Then the next thing is texture. And texture comes from, are the marks that are on the page. And in general, you want the texture in your book on the page to enhance the experience and not detract from it. And so e.g. if you have a bunch of grass or in this book, there is a bunch of water. And if like every single ripple was drawn in here that would just to visually busy. And so knowing where, where to put the texture and how to put the texture is also important. And so sometimes I'll research for that. And so e.g. in John classes, look, we see that there's a lot of texture that is on all the characters, but then the backgrounds are very simple over here. Obviously it gets busier at times on purpose or than if it's a digitally painted book like this one. You will see that in general it's, it's fairly flat, but then there's some let me see if it'll show better. So then there's some lines and some, some delicate little marks that help us. Kinda see the different details in the illustration. So there's a different variety of textures that you could be doing or in overhear, some of the textures are drawn out. There's just a different variety or sometimes there is no texture. So over here, it's just flat color and the texture there is, is maybe just the outlines are a little bit ragged E or bumpy on, on some of the some of the edges. Another thing that you could be looking at is also value. And value is the organization of the visual space with lights and darks. And so let me see. If we look over here, Let's see. So usually you have something that's dark and light and then you have some middle colors. So e.g. over here, we have a very dark character. It's got a light background, and then we kinda have a middle grade character in the front. For a middle value character in the front. And value was also a way of grouping things together and calling attention. And so if we look on this page of the illustration, we immediately see the main, main focal point is right here. That's the lightest part. And there's the highest contrast with head being dark and then the spots. And then the next thing we notice is the dark spot around here. So this is darkest and lightest. And then everything that's super busy, you can see that there's all these little details over here, but it's all in the same kind of grayscale value. And so that way it's interesting to look at, but it's not so busy that it detracts from where our eye goes first. Then another thing that I might look at is for movement. And in children, children's illustration, it needs to have movement in it. If you're drawing stiff character, standing with the arms on their side, look at how others are posing their characters with feeling and kinda lines of action. So I just wanted to show this book is illustrated by Mo Willems and lay when families. So this is Mo Willems, but you can see just the action in the way that the ears go up. And characters are moving. And you can feel how they're moving. And let me see. Oh, I should have. And so there's just a lot of action in this book, just the way that the characters are posed in their expressions on their face. And so there's just a lot of great movement in the book. Okay, so the last two things that we're going to be looking at is storytelling and pasting. And with storytelling, it's how much of the story we can tell just by reading the illustrations. And so that includes everything that we've talked up until I'm up until now and then props and movement. And so e.g. over here in the beginning of John Carson's book. You can kinda see how it's got the word. We're changing very little. But you can see how the eye is moving and how we can read what's happening in the book just by looking at the eye. And I wanted to just look at this spread really quick here. Just move that over. So this is railroad Hank that's illustrated by Benji Davies. And so over here, if I'm just looking at the storytelling just from this picture, there's a lot happening. So it's not just a man and he's carrying one chicken, but he's carrying many chickens. You can see he's taking a step. We see he's got a little sidekick over here. There's mountains. There's a rooster crowing. There's action going over here. And then we have all these little props with a fun idea with the feathers that are kinda trickling, falling off the hands and trailing. And so you can think about the storytelling within the book instead of just showing something statically. How can you tell a story with just one illustration? What story does the illustration town? And then lastly for pacing. Pacing is how the illustrations kinda move the story along and also you can include the words in it. And so usually there's, if you look through the book, there's the editors usually try to put the same amount of words on each page of the, the book. And you can, and then we can also look at how the pictures are moving the story along. So if we look over here, this kind of goes for both pacing and storytelling. We can look at how the illustrations are organized. So first we have this whole, whole page illustration with a lot of white background. And then we have these two vignettes as we're moving also pay attention to the words. And then we have these really fun strips that go across the whole thing. And then we get to big reveal with the giant illustration with, you know, that's the whole spread and big text on, on the side. And just in case we didn't know, it also tells us. And then we get back to vignettes and another. So it was kind of forced to go one way and then we're coming down the other way. So pay attention when you're looking at these books on just the variety of illustrations that, that are provided. Are they full spreads? Are the little vignettes multiple per page or is it a one-page illustration? And include a variety of those in your portfolio as well. Alright, so now we look at what different things we can learn from picture books. I wanted to talk just really briefly about doing master studies. 7. Master Studies: In this video, I wanted to go over a master studies really quick. So just so you know what they are. And if you are getting Illustrator and master studies are great and picking up new skills from already established illustrators. Or even if you're intermediate or more advanced in your illustration skills, it's still a great way to learn. Learn new techniques, and brush up on skills from illustrators who are more advanced than Yep. So in this video, I'll go over master studies just a little bit. And master studies are great if you are a beginning Illustrator and you want to learn a new technique. And if you are intermediate or advanced in your illustrators get illustration skills. It can still be a useful exercise to pick up on new little tidbits and new digital skills from illustrators who are maybe a little bit further apart from you, or who might have a skill that you want to learn. If there's something that you want to learn how to do better, e.g. color or composition, or maybe it's texture or just digital illustration. If you've always worked in watercolor or traditional media, then it's a great idea to find an existing illustration that already incorporates the skills that you want to learn and then try to recreate it. I would recommend that you try to recreate it in the media that you're trying to learn. So when I was trying to learn digital and procreate, I would find the illustrations that I would like, and then I would try to recreate them in procreate. When you're recreating a master study, you want to try to make it as close to the original as possible. You want to notice all the little details and designed, design decisions that the original illustrator had made. And then as you're working on the illustration, you actually notice those things a lot better than compared to if you are just observing and illustration in front of you and trying to know things, it's completely different if you're actually drawing the illustration because you are going to be looking at it a lot more closely. Even if you don't think you would be. Making master studies really surprised me on how much I could actually learn from an illustration. Here's two quick examples of some panels that I did master studies on by the water Watson. These are from his Calvin and Hobbes series. I did these studies to try to learn how he was using blacks and whites so effectively in his compositions. So by recreating his pieces, I was really able to kinda figure out how he uses blacks and whites and how he can create shapes with either leaving something uncolored or then coloring it in and everything in between. And so it was really valuable exercise for me. When you're working on master studies. It's really just meant for your eyes only. And maybe if you want to show, to critique partner to get some feedback on it. And it's meant for your, your learning purposes. It's not meant for you to post it on social media or in your public portfolio. So just keep that in mind when you're creating master studies, just keep it to yourself. In the next video, I'll go over how I take my research and use it for my portfolio pieces or my projects. 8. Research Example: In this video, I'll go over a little bit how I actually use these books for research and show you an example of an own project and a book that I've done myself. I've been reading books for research for about seven years since my kids were little. And then also, once I figured out, I wanted to start illustrating picture books and writing them. And over the years I've read hundreds, if not thousands of books. And so I have this great mental catalog of books that I read and ones that I like. And I also keep a Pinterest board of illustrators that I like and illustrations that I've collected over the years. And I also referenced back those for reference and research when the time comes. Alright, so e.g. when I was working on my picture, but Kitty and cat, the original illustrations that I had done for them, were way more loosely drawn at first. But then, because I knew that my target audience was younger kids under the age of five. And I knew that my books, we're going to have a lot of whitespace. I realized that I wanted more of a kind of a flat illustration style. I really liked the illustrations in eric hills spot series. But the Eric killed books were created when I was a kid and I wanted to update the look to a more contemporary, mid-century, modern kind of inspired style. And so I had a few illustrations or illustrators already in mind because this was a multiple. But the deal, I purchased a whole bunch of books just to have constantly on hand and for reference. And my drawings before or more representational and less stylized. So I use these books is referenced for how to flatten the surfaces and simplify my shapes. So my workflow usually goes at, I do online research and then visit the library. And oftentimes I buy a few books if I really want to keep them on hand. And then I make a box of books that I look at all at once and noting all the little details and things that I'm trying to learn. A lot of times I might even lead books out on the floor in a ring all around me so that I can look at everything at once and make mental notes. Then I put everything away and start sketching. And I might go back and reference if I get stuck. But at the same time I never want to copy anyone else's style for my own book project or a portfolio piece. I want to take elements and learn from others, but then create my own style that I'm comfortable illustrating it for a whole book project. And if you want to illustrate your books, you have to be able to pull this dialogue consistently for a whole book, not just a one-off illustration. So at this point, I would love for you to take a break from this class and go collect ten books that you find inspirational. You can share your favorite one in the class projects for the discussion section below this class. And also share the reason why. And together we can start building great resource inside of this class of favorite books. And that way we can be introduced to new illustrators and books that we've never even seen or heard before. I'll start by adding my favorite books in their first. In the next video, I'll show you more in depth how I did the research for the Cap character and Kitty and cat opposites attract. 9. Character reference: Alright, so I just wanted to share another quick example from my book, kitty and cat, opposites attract, which is actually a book series. And when I started sketching my dummies out for this book series, I realized that I was absolutely rubbish in drawing cats. I come from a fine art background. And so I know how to draw realistic cat. I can render a great looking cat. But then when it comes to picture books, especially for young kids, where you want a very simplified version of a cat that has great expressions. And a lot of, it's very animated. That realistic cat just wasn't going to cut it for me in the style that I wanted to illustrate. And so I had to turn to a lot of references to try to figure out how to draw cats were picture books. So one of the first things that I started is I looked at a bunch of references from cats, from books, and I saved a bunch of cat kind of character designs onto a Pinterest board. And so I just wanted to share. So in the beginning you'll see this Pinterest board is mostly just pictures of cats. And obviously I don't want to copy anybody else's character style. But I did too just to kinda get my hand used to draw and cats and use to draw and cartoony cats. I did go through and I drew a lot of these cats that you see here in the beginning. And down here too, you can see these with gear. Our ones were kind of my original idea of what I wanted the cat to look like. But then my idea kind of developed and changed as I went. I thought this little guy over here is really cute, but I did copy a lot of these and do a lot of master studies and sketches. Just I'm not to copy them, but to get my hand used to try and catch shapes and to let my brain figure out how, how cats or could be drawn. So this is just my Pinterest board. And then one slips. Once we start going up this Pinterest board, you'll start noticing that I started adding a little bit more backgrounds in here because I knew that some of my other, we'll look at this here in a minute. I knew that my other books would have backgrounds. My second book has a lot more backgrounds than my first book does. And so these are just pins that I've saved that I've used as reference or inspiration or my cat books. So here's just a short little Procreate video that I wanted to share of me sketching some cats. This is from most of these cats. This illustration is from Lorna scope bees collecting Katz book. And I also loved the cats in this one. And so I just sketched a whole bunch of them just to get that muscle memory and figure out how to, how to draw cats the way that I want to draw cats. And then at the very end you can see actual kind of the first kind of a sketch of how I wanted cap to look like in this book. So hopefully that'll give you some ideas on how to collect reference images. A lot of those illustrations that you saw on the Pinterest board, we're illustrations from books or from other favorite illustrators that I might have. And you can even upload photos onto, onto Pinterest as well. And what I actually did was I printed out a kind of a mood board for myself that I can keep as little thumbnail reference. And so it was just the eight-and-a-half by 11 where I printed my favorite pictures as teeny tiny little thumbnails. Just so when I was sketching stuff out, I can reference it really fast and look for either movement or color or some character ideas. When I was originally sketching for my book. In the next video, let's look at researching how to do some storytelling and pacing and layouts. 10. Storytelling Reference: When researching for storytelling or layouts and page counts, it's the best if you have access to the whole bucket name. So when researching layouts, you might be looking at the book as a whole to figure out how the illustrator use things like color and values and different types of illustration like vignette, circle spreads or single spreads. And how they use a combination of all those to create the movement and the action from one spread to an X to form a nice picture book that's interesting for kids to read. And sometimes you might just be looking at a single illustration for inspiration on how to create that one wild beast or your portfolio. So let's look at some thumbnails on how we can study a whole book just through looking at the thumbnails. And for this, I encourage you either to just sketch out all the pages in the book or you can take photos of them on your phone or scan it in your scanner and then lay all the pages. Are all the spreads of the book next to each other in one single document or a file. You can see everything at once and analyze it on the whole book as one piece of art. If you are planning a single illustration for your portfolio, you can look at single pages for illustration. Some illustrators that are great at layouts are Matt foresight, l1 fan, Melissa costume on Benji Davies and Isabelle Arsenault. So here's the examples of the thumbnail sketches from whole books. One is from phaco and the giant Julie plant. And one is roller coaster by Martin Luther crazy. And usually when I'm doing these kind of sketches, likely know where the text is. Like you can see over here, it's just with these little lines. So pay attention to how the words of the story are distributed on the page. First of all, editors usually try to keep it pretty even so that we can read the book at an even pace so that there's kinda like the same amount of text on each page. And then you can also see how the text is nestled in with the illustrations. How the illustrator has left room for the text as part of the illustration. Then you can see other ways when you just do the thumbnails of how the illustration, illustrator has used movement in line, also values to move the story along. So in both of these examples, you can see the lines of action on each page and how it's gone up and how it's going down. And you can also see the lines of action as you're going from one spread to the next spread over how that kind of visual line continues from one spread to the next. And then here if we look at these examples from David Hahn, he has scanned in the pages of Beagle and then he has also reduced them down to values. And if you're just looking at the color illustrations of the book, then you can kinda see the color story, how it starts with more cooler colors and darker colors. And then we turn into kind of yellows and brighter colors towards the end. And then you can also look. Learn about values and visual organization of this base. Once you reduce everything down to values. And as a great observation that David had made, beco is shown on the right page, on right side of the spread on most of the pages, except for kind of in the middle of where he feels lost. And then once he finds a spot again, then he's back to the right side of the page. And also and also the goal is the lightest color on each page, the brightest spot on each page. Once you start looking at these, these, these values. And also when you're looking at the values, you can notice and beco, how the values are much darker and how they get lighter towards the end as the story progresses. K, Another thing to look at when you have a whole book is to look at how the texts and the illustrations relate. Sometimes the text will tell you what the illustrations will show you. And sometimes there is a disconnection between the two that can be used to create tension or humor in your illustrations. So here's just an example of this is John Carson's. This is not my hat. So we start out with this half is not mine and I stole it. And so we have this little fish. And then you can also pay attention to what kind of devices the illustrator is using to create tension or drama in the illustration. In the next few illustration, the only thing that's really happening is the eye changing on this fish. And so we're hearing, on the top we see the texts, which is the thoughts of the little fish or the narration of the little fish. So it says I stole it from a big fish. He was asleep when I did it. And he probably will wake up for a long time. And so here we see that the text and the lines thumb, the texts and the illustration don't match. And even if he does wake up, he probably won't notice that it's gone. Again, difference between retail. And even if he does notice it's gone, he probably won't know it's me who took it. And yet again, so we're creating a lot of humor with the illustration in relation to the text where the two don't match. So some other questions that you can ask yourself when you are looking at these. These are kinda full-page illustrations. You can look at what little prompts, what little prompts that Illustrator is using. What little details bring the illustration to life? How does the character relate to the environment like e.g. over here, she's stepping over here. Does it look like the character belongs to the environment? And then what kind of clues do we have in the background that gives us a deeper insight into the main character of the story not found in the text. And so I really liked the illustrations in this book. You can just see e.g. the clothes that the characters are wearing or giving you some insight on on who the characters are. We have lots of action, lots of action lines. It's interesting that we have white backgrounds over here. This book would be really interesting. The thumbnail out to and see where the illustrator has used both page spreads and where they have used just white backgrounds. And how they are using these illustrations to tell the story. Once you start noticing the little details, you can start using those to inform your own illustrations that and remember that the end goal is not to copy other's work, but to use it as a point of inspiration and reference. 11. Three Notes: I just wanted to note a few things before the closing thought for this class that I thought were important to mention. And so the first thing that I wanted to mention is we are, I am concentrating on books that are created and sold in the US market in this class, mostly because the US market is the largest market in the world, and they also employ the widest and largest amount of illustrators. And so if you're trying to get into illustration, children's book illustration, that's most likely the market where you are. You could expect to be hired. And so it's, it's, it's a good market to be aware of. The second thing that I wanted to mention is representation. And when you are working for pieces into your portfolio, It's important to remember, especially in the current publishing climate, that representation matters. And so that has several different angles to it. So e.g. all kinds of bodies, bodies within wheelchairs, different overweight people, skinny people, old people, young people, deaf people have different abilities. So here's a book specifically about that. Also, if you have a different heritage or background, cultural background, that is also something that publishers are really interested in right now. So if you are a specific ethnicity or background, then it's great to include those types of images, illustrations also in your portfolio because it might be exactly what publisher or an art director is looking for. Here's just another example for a style specific or culture, cultural background, or heritage. I just pulled this out of the wheelchair. And also for ages, we have grandmas go, go, go in. So if you can represent different kinds of people, also LGBTQ is big in. If you have, if you belong to that group, then that might be something that you might want to be bored about, also, biography on your website. So this is the third part for this video. I wanted to share a few ideas on using references to troubleshoot common issues and picture book illustrations, especially issues that beginning illustrators might run into. These might be issues that you see yourself. Who are these might be comments coming from critique partners that you can look for solutions in already published books. And so I will make that, I will put that list and those questions into the handout so that you can use them easier for reference than me going over them. I don't, I don't have illustrations for this segment because I don't want to make anybody feel bad about the illustrations that they created. And so that's why this troubleshooting part is going to be text-only as part of your handout. Now let's move on to the last video for some final thoughts. 12. Final Thoughts: I hope that I've been able to spark a new love of reading for you and giving you inspiration on how to use published books as inspiration and a point for the growth rate. By the way, if you haven't followed me, it just hit on Apollo sign above and that way you'll be notified of my lashes coming up. I have a whole bunch of illustration, unrelated ones, and portfolio building. What's coming up next? Please share your favorite illustrators or your favorite book projects. It could master studies in the project section below for you could even share it some before and after illustrations that you've done with before and after research. I enjoy a sense of community. See what you find inspiration. I will also answer any questions and comments that are left on the discussion board. Or you could even post that you are looking for an accountability partner or a partner if that would make your journey easier. If you found this class helpful, I hope that you could leave a comment. It's really helpful for me to know if there's anything that I can upon or future classes. And reviews also help your students by my classes better, which will then build up that community and make this class better for future. Don't forget to print out the handout for this class. I put a lot of information in it and there's some links that you can follow for organizations that are helpful. And then I've also created a journal for this class. It is not necessary, but sometimes instead of printing individual handouts and trying to move thing, keep all those in place. It's easy to just have one journal where you keep all your notes from books that you've read. And it just keeps everything kinda entitled. So it's not mandatory to buy that, but it is optional and I'll stick around for that below. And also in the handout, you can find me on Instagram, under your bed jaws and on Twitter with miracle happening. And please tag me when you post things and I would love to re-post them and comment on your images that you, and if you're interested in the books that I have created, those can all be found on my website and i.com. Thank you so much for joining my class and I will see you in the next one. Bye.