Transcripts
1. Writing and Illustrating Picture Books: Intro: Do you want to be a
children's book writer or children's book illustrator? You want to do both? Well, I did and I loved
it and I'm here to share all the lesson's I
learned in that journey. High-end sangeeta
Angela Kumar and I have published
about for Books. Two of them are
Children's Books. My first swarm friends. And the second one is
always a window seat. Now, what is Books were done
in the span of two years? Swamp friends was the first
book I had ever done. I taught myself,
I made mistakes, I fell on my face, and then all the
lesson's I learned, I put into Zoe's window seat, which in my life easier, my workflow was
super-fast and I really thought it's time to
share my secrets. So here I am in this new Skillshare
class to share with you how I did get inspired
by life around me. I write stories and then I conceptualize them
and I storyboard them and I illustrate them
consistently looking the same. It's hard, but I'm here to
teach you how to do that. And finally how to do your layouts and then
export it and hopefully marketed so you can be published children's book,
author and illustrator. This class is for
beginners who want to write and beginner
artists who want to draw. What I'm using in this
class is an iPad. I use my computer or my
iPad to type out my ideas. I will be using Procreate and I will be doing my
illustrations on the iPad. But you are welcome to use any device that helps you
in your illustrations, whether it's been people, pencil, or any other app that
you're comfortable with. Whether it's fresco
or with a sketches, or whether it's Procreate, or whether it's a pen
and paper and paints. But whatever medium you have to let your imagination
come to life. I do use molar notes to help
me with my storyboarding, but I have also given you oh, JPEG with a Storyboard format, which when you enroll
in this class, you are free to use
in your journey as a storyboard or for your
stories in this class, I will also show you how
to create your own font. I will teach you how to find inspiration from your
daily life to get ideas and writing
prompts to help you ideate your next big
children's picture book. In this class, I will also share the tools that I
used to illustrate children's books and
the strategic steps I take to make my workflow
super efficient. Join me in this class
as we take a deep dive into writing children's books and illustrating
children's books. Once you enroll, you will get some resources that help you in your journey as an artist and a children's
book illustrator. So thanks for enrolling
in this class. I'll see you in the next lesson.
2. PROJECT: So for your project, there are a few things
that you can do. I understand that not
everyone can just immediately for a project,
create their book. I thought I'd share a
Storyboard format with you and you can create your
own storyboard with it. If you're on Procreate, I've shared a Procreate file. If not, I've shared a JPEG
file of a Storyboard format. So if you have an idea, create a storyboard,
scribble it, doodle. It can be messy, but create that and upload
that on the projects. I can see if you've actually learned how to
create a storyboard. Hopefully that will also
encouraged me because your projects always encourage teachers whenever you do them. Another option is if you have character in
mind without giving too much detail or any spoilers
because we'd all like to support you and bio books
when you publish them, which by the way, feel free to post when you
finished your project, you can post a link to the book that you
finally published. If you've gotten that
far, I'd be really, really happy to
even get your book. Feel free to draw a front, a left or right of your
character, whatever, whoever your character is, rough sketch doesn't have
to be a final sketch with just a rough sketch keeping
your character consistent. So these are the two project
options you're free to do. Remember, Skillshare is
an amazing community and there are lots of people
who encourage each other. I've been encouraged in
my journey at Skillshare. So give others the opportunity
to encourage you and I would love to see your work and what you've
learned from my class, look forward to
seeing your project
3. IDEA: Let's first talk about ideas. You can get ideas from anywhere. You can get ideas from watching
a movie being inspired by Pinterest, by a condensation. My first book was inspired by my
10-year-old daughter Zoe. One day I was sitting
with her and we were done with school and she can
share about her lessons. And I was just opening her textbook and I was
reading her textbook and there was a page
that talks about how in the swarm it
listed out these animals. It was a science textbook. And it said, sneaks
in the swamp, eat frogs, crocodiles eat frogs, ducks eat frogs,
and Duxiu Pebbles. So I was like what? Everyone eats frogs,
like poor frog. So then in the night, I was kind of like giving her a bedtime story
and I made up the story. And it was called swarm friends. It's about a frog who doesn't have friends and is looking everywhere for
friends in the swamp. But everybody eats,
wants to eat him. So it keeps looking,
keeps looking, and then finally
he finds a duct. Now the funny thing,
what a doubt has, ducks eat pebbles,
succeed frogs, decks eat a lot of things. So in my story I changed
it to the snake. Obviously wants to
eat the frog and so does the crocodile. But the duck says, Well, I can eat you, but I'm
choosing not to eat you. So that became like a premise of him becoming
friends with the frog. That Idea happened. And then with that
idea came a podcast. And then with that podcast
came my children's book. And so it all it takes
was a little spark of a conversation or a
little reference that I saw which I thought
out of the box. Similarly in Zui window seat, which is my daughter's name, she was sitting in the bus. There was a frog that
jumped into her window. So I kinda made it
a little bit of a sequel to swamp friends, where the frog jumps on the school bus and goes
and everybody gets scared. This was actually inspired
by one of the story she told me that happened in
actual frog jumped. And I can do animated the, the conversation and
thoughts of the frog and the little girl and
kinda went with it and created a small
story with a frog is traveling to school
and the hitches a ride with this little girl. So ideas come from everywhere. And what helps me is just
keeping my imagination open, keeping my eyes open, keeping your heart open. And sometimes you hear
the funniest things. And then based on that, you get the story idea. So every time I get an idea, immediately I pull up my
phone and I make a note and I see I'll write the idea. And sometimes that's just
an idea or an Art prompt. Sometimes it's a short story or sometimes it's a big
children's book. So make a note and write out what ideas you get and
be open and inspired, because inspiration
comes from the smallest and the humblest.
This is something
4. WRITING: Once you get that idea, then you have to figure out what is the story
going to be about. A big part of writing a children's book
or book in general, is figuring out who
your audiences. Even in Children's Books, you have to figure
out what age group your audience is going to be. For example, for small children, it's big pictures
and big quotes. Sometimes not even words, maybe one word or two words. And for, as the child gets
older, the words increase. So the big font and maybe two words a
forward eight words. When you are writing
for older kids, then you can go
into two sentences, four sentences, and then of
course go into paragraphs. So always remember, whenever you conceptualize what
you're gonna write, figuring out who your
audience is gonna be when it comes to printing, when it comes to font size, when it comes to
all these things, how big your Art is gonna be, isn't going to be detail, is you're going to
be a big character. My book was not targeted to very little children because very little children
may not understand. I'm the intricacies of
or they might get scared of being eaten by
these scary animals. So my group was more of five to six to seven
year old group who understood the
need for friends, the desire to have friends. So with that, I
changed the font, I change the
sentence structures, I changed the vocabulary. You won't always get it perfect, but always think
about these things. So all those details are
really important to look at. Writing a story can
be little difficult, especially if you don't
have experience doing it. So my advice always starts with establishing a
beginning, middle, or end. If you're really struggling, write down the list
of characters. For example, I'll use
my book as an example. My character was a frog. It had a snake, it had a
crocodile attached are dark, it had a lotus and it had
the setting of a swamp. So above what I was writing, I would write the characters down and I would also
write the setting. Based on that, I
would then break down each character, each scene. One of the things that helps me a lot when I'm writing is that I just go into this binder writing mode and I just
writer, I try to rotate. I may not use that, but I'll just write it out. All right, all the ideas I have. And it'll be almost like a dump on the page
of all my thoughts. Then I can come back and pick
and choose what I'd like. Writing the story
out can be tough. But my advice would be
just to just go through it and breathe through it because this is the
foundation that will help you
5. TREATMENT: We're still in the
writing process. The foundation of your story
Book of picture book is still in the
foundation when you're talking about the treatment
and smaller details. Who, what, where, when, how. These are the key questions that I would want you
to ask yourself. Who is your character? Is your character relatable? Is your character like a kid? For example, in my
story, frog was a kid. This is again where
you question yourself, what is your age group? The water, the Y is asking
yourself, what is the problem? Why is there a problem? Where is your story
taking place that all comes under the
smaller details. Talks about location,
time period. And finally, how would be, how did they solve the problem? Using my book as an example. Who would be obviously
my main character, who was the frog, right? Then what the problem
was that he didn't have friends and he
wanted friends, right? How do we tackle the problem? Was he went one-by-one to all the prejudices and wanted
to be his friend, write. And then where it was. Obviously it's the swamp. In your story writing. You can even experiment
with time periods. I didn't, I didn't get
into time periods. And then eventually, how did your main characters
solve the problem? Most of the time in stories, there's a setting,
there's a crisis, and there's a solution. And this is the format of
most children's books, whether it is the
frog doesn't have friends and the
frog needs friends and the frog gets friends. And what the fraud needs to
bear to get those trends. And what dangerous and parallels the frog has to come
through every story, every movie, every book
that you've ever read. It's always a character setting, a problem and then a solution. When you start simplifying
your ideas this week, it makes it really easy to
break your thoughts down. So try that. Answer. The who, what, where, when, why, and how question
for your own ideas. And see how you are
able to expand and get a few more details
to help you in the foundation process
of writing your story
6. CREATE AND PLAY: Once you've got to idea, then you've got your
story written down, and then you've
got finer details like who, what,
where, when, how. Now we're ready to move on
to the Illustration part. So that's what's coming up next. So creating and
playing around with the different poses and
different options of what you'd want your
character to look like is now the first phase
of Illustration. You're actually just
playing and creating. You're figuring out,
does my dinosaur look? How does my dinosaur look
in the modern world? I'm just throwing ideas
here, Idea prompts. But this is where you
start turning around. So if you have a character
which is a dinosaur, then you know you have to
see your dinosaur walking. You have to see a left and right profile
of your dinosaur. This is a time to start playing. Does you're asking
questions like, does your dinosaur
carry a briefcase? Does your dinosaur have a hat? These basic things that you can start
playing around with, with different poses
comes in handy to emphasize what you really want your character
to look like. It's all about playing. I would really
emphasize that Art, creativity, if you
don't have clean it, if you don't have
experiments and doing bad versions
and good versions, the front of it is going. So this is the time when
you start playing around. Again, don't be afraid
to be experimental. And even if it's squiggles
and lines that are not clear, just do it because with
those squiggles of lines, you will get a form
and that four, we will be really happy with. One of the challenges I
had was in my first book, I worked really hard
and getting my frog. And then I realized that the
frog had to climb a tree. And I spent like two
days working on my frog. And then I realized
that I had to spend another two days working on my for all climbing a tree. So I realized that I couldn't redo and
rehash the same thing. So then I went back
and I redid my frog in a more simpler way where I could move his arms up and down. Depend. And of
course it was funny because I was just knew
I was just starting out. I didn't know about form and
but for me it was a okay. I need the frog climbing up. I need the frog climbing down. This is the frog smiling. This is the frog worried. So again, understanding
the poses and was very important for my second book. So
he's window seat. It was a lot more
easier because I knew the mistakes that
I had learned from. Everybody had different poses. Even the teacher
who gets scared in the bus had a different pose. The bus had different poses, the settings had
different angles. And all of this
got into the book. Everything I used, every single scrap of
Illustration that I did, even the experiments, because
I knew I wanted this, I wanted that and, you know, and width the play
that I did and width, just fooling around
and sketching and remember to have FUN. That's why I called
it create and play. Because this is again the
foundation of the Illustration. Earlier we looked at the
foundation of your writing. But now it is the foundation
of your Illustration.
7. STORYBOARD: Essentially Storyboard generally sounds extremely daunting. Many times anybody who wants, because like a story
or a storybook will put their ideas on
people in a thumbnail. And this thumbnailing process helps them kind of
get an understanding of an overall picture of what they'd like
their book to look like. This comes handy for the person helping you
with layout or yourself. When you're finally
doing your Layout. It defines a lot of things. So Storyboard, in my
opinion, at least, can save a lot of your time investing in time
to do your Storyboard. And it is that it's been
sticking sometimes, especially since you have
everything in your mind. But it's almost
like a brain dump. You just dump all
your ideas onto. For example, you then, now with the storyboard, you get to decide how many
pages your book is gonna be. Okay? Do you want to
20-page or 28 beach? Of course. All also depends on how you
are publishing your book. Are you giving it
to a publisher? Are you giving it to ADP or you bought a
Self Publishing it? There's an app
called Miller note, and I really liked
the browser version because it gives you the
option of storyboarding. And then you can import your
doodles or your squiggles, or even your text into
the storyboard section. But that has been a game-changer
for me because it's got these automatic
Storyboard ideas, which then you can just import your doodle, so important text. So that helps me a lot. It's been agreed visual platform for me to be able to
express what I want to see in terms of
storyboarding and merging my sketch ideas
to my text ideas. If the idea of a
storyboard is daunting, then I would also suggest if
you are more text person, then just open a text
app and break down your, your script and your ideas for Illustration in bullet form. Essentially this is the stage where your text and your
drawing gum together. Storyboarding really heads. It's not necessary. But if you are a visual person, then having a Storyboard
really comes in handy. Sometimes I used to think
storyboard is just double work. But once you have a storyboard, even the Illustration
part becomes easier. If you're Illustrating your Book Yourself,
just like I did. Then storyboarding
really helps you get an idea of the placement
of the characters. Whether you want to
moving Illustration, where you want to Illustration
on the left page or the right page or you
want to complete spread. However, what's
very important is that even if you are
not illustrating it, your Storyboard helps the artist who's going to come on
board and help you. So getting your thoughts
onto paper in the form of a, of course the story, but character lists, settings, a Storyboard, always a great
way to begin your project. Begin your storybook
because it helps you get down on people
watch you need. It becomes like a checklist
also when you're working with other people and even for
yourself, I had a checklist. I knew I had these
many pages to fill. This was my scene
with the snake. This was my senior
with the crocodile. This was my scene with the duck. And as I went along,
I knew, okay, three illustrations for
this tree illustrations. So working backwards and saying, what do I need and
then how will I break this down really comes in handy. In the next lesson,
we're going to be looking at batch drawing
8. PROCREATE TIPS AND RESOURCES: So one of the things
I want to talk about is the brushes
that you can use that can enhance
your illustration. Now, it isn't just
brushes are Procreate. Essentially my first
tip of point will be use textured brushes
or textured people. When you use texture, it just looks really good. It looks like the real thing. Many artists who pinned get
this texture automatically, where it comes to Digital Art, when you add texture
to your illustration, it just has a, a really wonderful
quality to it, even as it children's
book illustrator, I have found that people loved my textured work much better. Use texture to
enhance your artwork. So this texture can
be brought about using texture brushes,
texture paper. If you see the example
of this cactus, without texture,
It's very normal. This is, I've overlaid a
little more texture over this. When you go and print
it into a book, it looks really nice. So coming back to
like for example, my pomegranate that I did
without texture paper. It's like this. It doesn't look very great. Whereas you slap on some texture paper and
looks really beautiful. Now another way, duplicate
this and add this. Now, all the texture
is now no longer on. This is still safe, but all the textures come
directly on your illustration. So this is the
illustration that I did, and this is the Canvas effect. This was an elephant I drew
for music video, I did. So this is the way you
can really have FUN in Digital Art because there's
so many cool resources. So I basically drew
an elephant and then I colored it
and added texture. And then I did multiple
layers of grass. Then this was the sky
color that I chose. Then we say elephant, it gets a daytime. Look, right? So this is how you can experiment
with your Illustration. You don't need to only
stick to the ones that are bought even within your
Procreate customized brushes, there are lots of cool
things you can do. Like, there's a
fantastic brush that I think it's like a great tree, can get a wonderful treatment. Click the sketching brushes are really nice for sketching. Of course. Sketching, inking,
Drawing, Painting, artistic brushes are
really fantastic. Of course, texture
is also fantastic. So now my son is
coming from here. So the shadows will be here. Right? And then the light. I don't want to
solid color, okay? I want to blue, but
I want to blue, which is kind of, let's remove this right. Now. I want to blue which is little texture
in my illustration. So now I just used Nico
role or let's say, let's get a different
shade of blue. And now I'm smudging it. Didn't intend to,
but just smudging. I'm basically, let's get some
clouds and so to texture. Now, even if you
add the background, you've still got a
beautiful textured look already. This is looking very cute and very much like a
storybook reading. I want to move the tree
admitted to the left. I select Freehand
is selected tree. And I just move it a little bit more to the left or
resize it again. So now that gives me a little
room here to add some text. So now if I want to, I
don't need to add texture. I can add it on the
later Layout stage. If you want to just
see how it looks, you can add some text. Was happy. Generally a lot of
people don't like using text on procreate. They like adding their
own texts separately, which is why we're putting
it on separate layers. So this gives you an idea, but then you don't need
to export it that week. So now when I'm exporting it, I have an option of exporting just the background separately. And then remember
to address bread. And then you can export
this separately. And then you can even
export this separately, and then you can put
it all together. And then finally, stage
9. BATCH DRAWING : Batch drawing is something that really helps me and I
think it may help you. It was like one
week or attendees which I just
dedicated to drawing. I drew background separately, I drew characters separately. I drew different angles
and poses separately. And then I created
a whole stack. I use Procreate. But you can use
any app you want. You can even like painted, what happened was
that batch drawing saved my life and it made the final stage of
putting my book together really easy because I created
everything in PNG format. So I could just export my little character and
drag it onto the scene. So it was almost like I was
assembling my characters by background and other
characters into a scene. Some people like
doing it altogether, but because the characters are consistent in your stories, especially for me, my crocodile had to sneak into
the scene, right? So I had the same scene, but the crocodile was jumping
from tree to tree to tree. So in that I had to put the crocodile in
different points. Batch drawing helps with that. So this is, this is like one of the secrets that
like if I could ever give to illustrators or writers who also want to
illustrate their picture books. Is that having a dedicated time to finish your
illustration work, your final illustration work, and then put it together and your final state will
save you a lot of time. This is also a great way to keep it consistent because
consistency in your characters
is really the key of having the readers identify
with your character rig. You can't have a short noise and along nodes in
the next scene. So having a consistent
it's not easy. Actually. I had recently I had a project where I was drawing
a good who is sad and her front angle was
very difficult because her side profile
was easier because her eyes were down and
her lips were pouty. Whereas the front angle, I had to show the
softness of her face. But I had to get it right
for every single angle. If you're into bins Drawing, then Set a week or ten days just to draw, draw, draw, draw. Get all your backgrounds
ready or buildings ready. Of course, in the
end you still may add like forward,
Zoe's going to see it. After I finished the whole book, I realized that the last scene, I wanted a better
illustration for the buildings and The
story coming to an end. So then I had time to add one last illustration that I hadn't done in
my batch drawing. But that was easy to
do because I had done all the hard work in
the initial part. So this really, really helps me. I hope it helps you to Batch draw your final Art
into different, different PNGs so you can put it together when it comes to character design
consistency is key. The same pearls, the same
shade of red lipstick, the same dress,
the same patterns. All this helps a lot. The way I do it is that I create a large document and draw
my characters on that. I keep copying and
pasting elements from my character
and adding them on. This comes in handy for
things like eyes, nose, lips. But like what happened
with my frog is that I created a smiling, frowning, worried, scared frog. So it was just the
expressions that kept Genie. I kept it extremely simple. And that's another thing
that you should remember. Try and keep your
illustrations simple. Because especially for children, they are not gonna get into, deep into the intricacies
of your fins. And of course the detailing
would be amazing. But to make your life
easy, start simple, and then build on it in a way
that you can be consistent, because consistency is key. It's key for your book
to look its best. Some people use their own faces. Some people use the
people's faces around them. They are also people who create clay versions of the
character that they want. So they can get
different angles. If you're good at ceramics
and you're good at building, then please go ahead and
do that if that helps you. In the next lesson,
we'll be looking at putting it all
together in layout
10. FONTS : We're Fonts needs to be legible. Be careful about fonts that you're using
from the Internet, because fonts also
have copyrights. So ensure that you have bought the copyright of the font that you
are trying to use. Or if you can afford a font, if you can't afford
the copyright. Than they are really cool
ways of making your own font
11. LAYOUT: Once you've got
your story written, and then you've got the
illustrations in place. Whether you've given it to an artist to put all
these things together, or you've given it to yourself and you've put
everything together. Putting your words and the layout and the
background together into a book is basically
when you focus on layout. Layout is when everything
comes together. For many people
with Mac computers, pages is a great software that has pre-made books
and book layout. So you just have
to drag and drop your picture and then it gives you a placement
for the text. So if you are a newbie and
you're stuck with the layout, and you have a Mac computer than pages is a fantastic resource, which is pretty basic for
you to understand that. As I got more advanced, I started using InDesign and then I started
using affinity. So indesign is excellent,
It's very advanced. But if you don't
have a subscription, which is what I didn't have what I couldn't use it anymore. I moved on to Affinity Designer. And affinity designer
is extremely simple. I designed Zoe's
window seat and that Remember one thing,
less is more. So you can actually have one Illustration per page
with a little bit of text. White space is not an enemy. Don't crowd your pitch. I realized that giving the
reader's time to breed and enjoy your layouts can really be helpful in the whole
process of enjoyment. Let's think about your
favorite Children's Books. Were they so crowded or were they spaced out and
generous with pages? There are also other apps
like the studio app, Canva, who helped in
creating layouts for Books. Canvas for me at least is a
little bit hard Studio also. You have to manually
do a lot of things, but what I what helped me a lot with duplicating the
page that had already done. One essential thing to remember, the spread of your page is
two pages put together. So sometimes you will focus on our left page or right page. But there are sometimes
when you can create an amazing array on the
two pages together. But be careful to not be read your text onto
the other beach. So working with guides and rulers around your page
are really important. So remember that because once you go over that and there will be a
bleed and maybe texts, especially text,
should not get lost. So for safety sake, always put your text maybe an
inch or two above the guide so you don't have
any issues later on when you're printing
or publishing your book. If you're publishing on kVp, they have formats
for their Books, which brings me back to why it's so important
to work with layers. When you have of background separate and your foreground separate annual
middleware and separate. The publisher wants
landscape or portrait, or this size of that says, you can still go back
and redo the layout according to your
different layers. So remember that it's a very important point to add to when you're
doing your own layout
12. COVER: The main body of the book is designed separately
and the Cover, the front cover
in the back cover are designed separately. This is just to make
the printers life easy, mostly because the printer will print the inside of the
book or separately, and then the cover will be
printed in a different format. Many people make a big
deal out of the cover. The cover is like judging the
book by the cover is really a real thing because
a Cover is going to decide if a person is going
to pick your book up or not. So many people hire different artists to
just do their covers. And it is very important
that you notice when you are Illustrating
your own cover. Sometimes you can take the best of your story and put
that on the cover. It's like a teaser or trailer. Or sometimes you can have a
completely different cover, like in my cover for
Zoe's window seat. I had a beautiful pattern around the Cover behind my character. So the character was the same
as she wasn't the inside. But the background
was gray floral work. So just take some time to
think about the Cover. Remember to leave space
for the author and illustrator if you're not illustrating it or if
you're just the author, remember to have a beautiful
bold font for your title. Think a lot about the
position of your book cover. Also, the back Cover, don't forget the back cover. A lot of times you
have to design a front and back cover together. A lot of times and KTB, your front-end or back cover, if it's not meeting
the guidelines, whole book gets rejected
and then you have to keep coming back and make
changes and tweaks. Also don't forget to write acknowledgment or
dedication or thank you. So if a person
picks it up a new, turn it around, they can
read what the book is about. That's again, you're putting
your best foot forward rate. The book cover is what your, what is going to get a
person to pick up your book and give a little
attention to your Cover. It may not be the same
scenes inside the book. Maybe it's completely different, but let the cover
some of the best of your book and let that
be your best foot forward.
13. EXPORT UPLOAD SUBMIT: Then of course it's time
for you to export it, upload it, and submit
it and publish it. Now, this of course, differs between who you
publishing it with. If you go into
publishers or you don't know who to published
his book width. There are many
publishers that accept manuscripts or thumbnails
are storyboards, which you can start
submitting to. In my experience, GDP has been the most reliable publisher because I have control over the layout and
what I'd like to. Of course, I've stayed
within their rules. But there are many sites that allow you to self-publish
a book as well. Whatever you want. Customization is fine when
you're Self Publishing. Of course, if your
publisher is eclectic and then it's possible
to do that as well. Very important to do
research during this phase, to get the right publishers, to get people who are
reliable and trustworthy. Don't give your book to
anyone and everyone. Create a sample page for
your book so you can send only that little bit to
them because there's a lot of piracy that happens
is a lot of copying. Always have a beach, are ready for publishers to show them small
samples of your work. And then if they're interested, and then they discussed
the contract, if the sign the contract, NDA, whatever needs to
be done, and then finally do the submission
14. MARKETING: And finally, probably the most difficult part of publishing
a book more than writing, more than ideating,
more than Illustrating, more than Batch
Illustrating more than layout is marketing. Marketing is actually
very challenging. You can use social media tools like YouTube,
instagram, Facebook, Google, Ads, whatever
to market your book, you can also use your
newsletter if you have one to publicize your book. Word of mouth has been probably my most successful way
of selling my books. Because it was all local. It was all within my community or people who liked my book, told other people about my books later on you
can even market-to-book by reading a small bit
of your book on a live, interactive YouTube session or Instagram session where you have people ask you
questions about your book. So there are many ways
to market your book. You really the sky's the limit, but it is a challenging
part of this process. If you can sign up
with the publisher, normally they take care
of the marketing part. And that is but I haven't
gone through a publisher, I've gone through KTB, so I needed to do my own marketing. So that was challenging. But definitely if a
publisher signed Xian, then marketing is
a piece of cake. But that doesn't mean
that you don't talk about your book to people you don't post on social media,
but that Book, nowadays, you have a plan, like you start releasing your character a
little by little. Then you do a reveal
the new and nouns. Then you say, Okay,
this isn't a store. Then you go to the
store, you sure you have a picture,
you two stories. So these are great ways to
help you market your books. But remember to do that
because it's really, you've worked so hard, you've gotten this far. So it's really important that you are able to market your book
15. ENDING THOUGHTS: Being a children's
book illustrator and writer has been quite fine. It's been empowering because
I haven't dependent on anybody and my journey
as an artist has grown. Width. My journey as being a children's book
illustrator and a writer. Sometimes you can do it all. Sometimes you can't, but
don't be hard on yourself if you struggled with the drawing part of
the writing part. Either way, I do
want to encourage you through all the steps that have gone through
in this class. From ideating and finding
ways to get inspired. We'll get ideas of
prompts and how to scribble your way
through storyboarding, being consistent and using
layers and then finally, creating a layout
that will help you and then exporting and
then eventually marketing. I really hope you've
got the value for this class and I really am excited
to see your projects, your Storyboard, so you're consistent characters and
please feel free to share. If this class has
helped you even go to the point of
publishing your book, I'll be so happy to
see your journey and how it helped you feel free to reach out
also on social media, I'm saying Art
Studio on Instagram. And I'd be happy to connect
the adventures that the children go through
and you read the book is exactly the same when you're illustrating it
or you're writing it. And then when it comes
together is beautiful. So I hope you can experience that level of joy that I have. I wish you-all the best for your journey as an
illustrator and a writer. Children's Books