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Writing and Illustrating Picture Books

teacher avatar Sang, Artist & Media Creator

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Writing and Illustrating Picture Books: Intro

      3:22

    • 2.

      PROJECT

      1:50

    • 3.

      IDEA

      3:25

    • 4.

      WRITING

      2:58

    • 5.

      TREATMENT

      2:25

    • 6.

      CREATE AND PLAY

      3:30

    • 7.

      STORYBOARD

      3:43

    • 8.

      PROCREATE TIPS AND RESOURCES

      6:43

    • 9.

      BATCH DRAWING

      4:39

    • 10.

      FONTS

      1:46

    • 11.

      LAYOUT

      8:52

    • 12.

      COVER

      2:17

    • 13.

      EXPORT UPLOAD SUBMIT

      1:46

    • 14.

      MARKETING

      2:08

    • 15.

      ENDING THOUGHTS

      1:44

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About This Class

After publishing two children's book, I found a fantastic workflow to help me write and illustrate picture books. Today I'm sharing the lesson's I learned with you. Taking you through the ideating process to the marketing process here are is a brief look at the outline of this class.  

Lesson 1: Idea

Lesson 2: Writing

Lesson 3: Treatment 

Lesson 4: Create & Play 

Lesson 5: Storyboard 

Lesson 6: PROCREATE Tips and Resources 

Lesson 7: Batch Drawing 

Lesson 8: Fonts

Lesson 9: Layout

Lesson 10: Cover

Lesson 11: Export Upload and Submit

Lesson 12: Marketing 

I hope this helps you in your journey as a writer and an illustrator of picture books. 

Some useful resources available for Illustration (Procreate)

Character Drawing Toolkit by Lisa Glanz 

Expressions Brushset

Calvin's Watercolor Set

Nathan Brown's ULT Canvas (Old Vintage Paper)

Brad Woodard Brushset I love for illustrating  

Nitty Gritty for coloring

Meet Your Teacher

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Sang

Artist & Media Creator

Teacher
Level: All Levels

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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