Top 10 Lessons I Learned to Create Children’s Book illustrations!

hey guys will terry here and today i am going to show you the 10 most important lessons i learned in creating children's book illustrations and um so i haven't made a video like this in a quite a long time um one about technique most of the the stuff on my channel is about the business side of illustration that's that's really what this channel is about but sometimes i like to also go into the art and um and talk about the creation of of art and this one is a video that i've wanted to make for a long time because uh becoming an illustrator you know 30 years ago i can take and look back and see all the things that i've gained and this is a video that i wish that i could have watched as a student um to to kind of map out what i needed to learn and to put it in a kind of concise condensed form so let's dive in before i get started i just wanted to say that at the end of this video i'm going to tease a brand new children's book course that the lead and jake and i have been working on and it's called children's book pro and uh i'm gonna have all the information in that at the end okay here we go so i am gonna start at the bottom of the list and work my way up to what i think is the most important uh uh concept or idea that i've learned and so we're going to start on number one this is a this is a sketch i'm going to use this um sketch in this painting to demonstrate a lot of the things that i've learned along the way this is my most recent work that i've done and i did this one just for fun this one's actually going to is going to be a studio painting that's going to hang outside my my studio outside and but it's it's a children's book illustration and um i'll bring some other um children's book stuff in as well um and so let's just dive in so the num the the number 10 thing that i learned was edge control and i'm just gonna turn on my um paint layer and um this is you know this is not a photoshop um video this is this these principles could be applied to to anybody whether you're using traditional media whether you're using digital it doesn't matter the the concepts and the principles are exactly the same um and so what i mean by edge control is that early on in my work um and in every artist we tend to not really think about um how important it is to control the craftsmanship of our edges so if i go into you know these these blades of they're not really grass it's more like a maybe like a yucca plant or something like that but they have to be perfect even if they're not um they don't have to be crisp down to you know like like if you zoom in this far they don't have to be crisp but they have to feel uh more crisp than the stuff in the background and like the the uh oops the edges of these rocks here you know in the edge of this lizard right here um really going in and reinforcing that the edge of the turtle and i'm you know i'm coming back in and i'm painting light the light and reinforcing these edges and really crafting them up trying to keep them consistent and um and understanding the difference between crisper edges and more blurry edges here in the background and in these mountains so that's number one now the second one is kind of similar to it and you could say they're kind of they kind of can be taught at the same time but one is really more of craftsmanship and the number nine one is atmosphere and atmosphere is the the uh the ability or the the technique of trying to make your paintings look like they really have depth and there's really you know a bunch of different ways to do that one of the main ones is through edge control and making sure that blurry edges are in the background and crisp edges are in the foreground and if you mix them up and that's what what a lot of times people do when they're when they're beginning is they'll make these hard lines in the background then when they get to their character or to the main things in the foreground because they don't have they can't handle the the medium whether it's digital or whether they're using traditional paint or or pastels or whatever the the foreground characters and objects become more blurry and that's reversed and that's going to give you that's going to make your paintings look more amateurish it's going to make your work look um it's it's not going to build depth in your painting so that's that's one thing for atmosphere another one is muting the colors and i'll talk about color in a little bit a little bit further in but but um as things go back in the distance they um become more muted and these are concepts that we talk about at svslearn.com in in our classes there um i have a class called creative composition i go through all of it there if you're interested but um yeah so there's really three things um with atmosphere it's the blurry edges it's the neutralized or the more muted colors and then the third thing back there is the lack of value contrast things tend to to move into more of the gray zone and in the background you'll you'll see less white and less black and and less contrast so um if we look at this painting the darkest darks in this painting are definitely in the the middle and foreground we've got this dark little crow here and the guitar case and and the windows and stuff those are in the foreground but you won't ever see black as the blackest black or the whitest white in the background and so that's another thing so that's atmosphere okay number eight is gonna be telling secondary stories okay telling secondary stories and um this one i don't really have much of a secondary story although you could say that there's a little tortoise in the hair thing going on here which i did kind of throw in there but since this is more of a a fun children's piece that's that's just meant to stand on its own there isn't a whole lot of secondary storytelling here but i do have an example that i want to bring in a spread from the book that i illustrated by marjorie kyler c-u-y-l-e-r um called bonaparte falls apart and and just looking at this this uh right facing page the text says sometimes his bones rolled away and it took him forever to find them now remember when i got that text that's all i had i didn't have there was no direction on which bones rolled away um i could do basically anything with this it wasn't set in a bedroom there's no there's you know there i could put this anywhere and i could have any of his bones rolling away and i tried different ones um i actually go into depth more on this in the in the children's book uh pro course that we're launching but anyway the secondary story here if you haven't already figured it out is um you know i could have had him trying to find his head and almost reaching his head boring right so making your illustrations more interesting by telling a secondary story that doesn't overshadow the main story but adds a little flavor for the viewer and the reader and so having him you know obviously he's going to find the basketball first and that's that's as an illustrator you've got to be creative in coming up with secondary stories to tell that your author or that you as the author didn't tell in the text so that they kind of marry together and they really work well together and they complement each other so telling secondary stories is another thing that i really learned in my career is becoming a children's book illustrator the number seven is going to be focal point color so i'm going to go back to my my painting here and really to to tell this to show this concept if you had looked at my early work which i have a piece right here when i was painting an acrylic i put color everywhere i put reds and this this isn't even the best example of how not to do it but i was using color arbitrarily i was like going straight into the tube and i was like even bragging arrogantly that i had these bright vivid colors and you know and i i think what what happened is you know early on people were like oh that's really colorful you know and i really did enjoy um blending colors and just painting and really not thinking about these ten principles and concepts that i'm talking about and just doing whatever i wanted and the problem with that is you don't give your viewer any relief and you make everything important and if everything is important guess what nothing's important so in order to make things important and to have a hierarchy in your paintings of where to lead your viewer in this because that's what you need to do for storytelling you need to take your viewer and tell them what you want them to look at what is the most important parts of your illustration and more importantly where you don't want them to look the parts of your illustration that are to carry um the the the main characters so you've got to have those those elements in the background for setting and for context and things like that but you don't want people to get stuck on them you don't want people to just sit there looking at them forever so um so in this little turtle camping picture uh i've only used red once there's there's really only i mean a bright saturated red and if we go in with the color picker and we we we let's just look at the sky and we'll get uh let's just get our palette out here and we'll just check and see where where colors are coming in so if i check in the sky i mean like look this is white and this is black and so like perfect grays would be over here void of any color right so you're just talking about value and over here we're talking about pure saturated color you can't get any more vivid and more saturated than that the brightest color right up in that corner and then of course we're down here on black again and and that's a that's a mixture between the color but it's essentially black down here so anywhere in here on any of these colors this this is those for any color family you're talking about some saturated color even in here you're talking about some pretty bright colors once you start getting over here you're talking neutralized color there's not much pigment in there at all if you're mixing this with paint same thing not much color so as i sample throughout my painting look where in the sky and in the clouds there's just not much color happening anywhere okay and what about this mountain back here same thing so everything in the background is neutralized and that was something that took me forever to learn and the and the thing is it actually makes your paintings look more colorful i mean look at this cactus even in even in the green the bright areas of the cactus they aren't i mean like if i if i were to go like a cactus is green so let's get green right and and let's go ahead and paint with some of that green let's say let's say learn how to use photoshop first and uh and and click ok first but i mean like if i'm if i wanted to uh to really paint with green why didn't i just use some of this here you know i mean that that would look better right and and the answer is no i mean obviously it looks horrible and i thought in the beginning that's how you could make a painting look better now you can definitely get to those colors and there are places for those colors what about this red let's find out where let's go back to the color palette this is probably the most saturated color and there you go so if you again in um in talking about focal point colors if you restrict the the uh the saturated color to the places that you really want people to look you're gonna have a more dynamic painting you're gonna have a more colorful painting and you're gonna have a a more um balanced color painting um and so that's a that's a really important thing that i learned there um even like this reflected color under the hat is probably pretty saturated yeah so we got these oranges under here so that's you know this is our focal focal point right here this main character and that's where i want the the color okay so that's number seven um number six is um basically the same thing using neutralized colors i separated them out because i i want people to realize that uh you know you've got a number one put your focal point where you want it those that's where you want your saturated colors and then pretty much everywhere else you want to use neutralized colors so i'm going to go back in there again i really can't hammer this home enough but here's your i mean here's the red rock now of course it's in shadow you know let's look at the turtle the the greens on the turtle i mean they're just they're not how about up in here on this cheek they get lighter but they're just not they're not super saturated green so um and then this this this rabbit over here so staying neutralized and then really hitting those accent colors on the focal point super super important so that's neutralized colors okay now um uh number five is editing out uh the details and one of the things that i if i go back to to this painting i mean like i've got grass blades i'm painting individual grass blades everywhere and and this piece isn't really the worst i i have pieces but they were hard to find because i didn't have scans of them from my really super early work where it was horrible and you know this is this piece was probably done five years into being maybe seven years into being a professional illustrator and um you know i i gotta tell you back then when i was out illustrating and making a living as an illustrator for seven years i had a very high opinion of myself and i thought that my work was great and it took until about the 15-year mark for me to go oh guess what will you don't know jack squat about illustrating children's books you suck and you know you're sure you're better than the the junior high kids and you're better than the high school kids and you're better than the college kids most of them because most of them don't try to get out there and and um and and sell their work and become illustrators but you're not stacking up to the the top illustrators and if you want to make a career in illustration you've got to compete at the highest levels i mean you just have to if you want to stay busy and and be getting work so a big part of this was i had to um i had to understand over time and i had to have get critiques from other artists who would say you know like why are you illustrating every blade of grass did you have to do that you know why are you um why are you making your characters more complicated than they need to be why are you why are you putting backgrounds and putting elements in the background that aren't necessary that aren't telling the story and you know you get enough of those kinds of critiques and you get enough people um telling you that you know questioning what you're doing and if you're if you're serious and you you can humble yourself and listen you can learn a lot and you can learn a lot about yourself and then you can open your eyes to see what other artists are doing at the top ones and go oh okay so they're solving this problem totally different they're not illustrating every blade of grass they're not illustrating any grass they've got like a little weed over here and there and and they're they're focused on telling the story which is what i should have been focused on um okay so that is number five and number four is maintaining my sketch and so if i go back um let's see let's go to the sketch here so you can see i painted that sketch and in the beginning when i first started painting i would always paint over my sketch to where i would completely lose it and i wouldn't know so then i'd be drawing with the paintbrush and i'd be making it up and my paintings never turned out as good as my my drawing you know so so i'd have a drawing and i'd be happy with it and you can see on here actually a place where i where i uh made a change i know let me zoom in here a little bit so you can see see that lizard there i ended up not liking his eyes when i put him in there and i i thought you know he's got too much character he's um you know there's because he's looking at the turtle maybe there's a little bit too much relationship there um and maybe he just wants to be a little more anonymous he's just there he's just hanging out that way more focal point on the turtle and i'm not telling a story that is unnecessary there so that was a little just a little um extra thing there but yeah so um with painting definitely harder to maintain your sketch when you're when you start adding paint with digital much easier because you you can have your sketch on a separate layer and you can just start painting on it and if you start to lose it you can turn the opacity down on the paint layers and so forth and so on and you could even bring your sketch up you know i could uh i could duplicate this and throw it up on top and turn the opacity down and now i've got my sketch back you know and uh i would actually do that when i was painting traditionally uh i would i would go back in and paint or i'm sorry go back in and draw this is when i was working in acrylic paint and i if i started to lose my sketch i would it was so it became so important to me after probably five or six years i realized i gotta maintain my sketch and i would go back in and draw with pencil on top of my painting so that i could have my sketchback because i could barely see it enough to draw it back in and before i lost it completely i would draw it back in and and fix it and make sure that i was on track um and so that's super important that's a that's a mistake i see a lot of my students making um where they will um you know they show their sketch and then they show the painting and i'm like you went awry you went off the trail on this this um sketch here and they're like well it's hard to it's hard when you start putting painting paint on there and i'm like i know i get it it's super hard and let's let's work on some techniques to keep that um so that's super important number three is drawing mechanics and you know i i even it was this was my weakest thing was was good drawing mechanics and that's drawing with volume and it's it's funny because i turned my weakness into a strength i i created a class at svslearn.com called visualizing drawing in perspective and this was like my therapy class for myself almost to just say look you've learned how to do this now make sure that you know it frontwards and backwards and put it in a class so that you can show other people and this one is is really it's not about it's it's it's not this this particular class if you ever want to look for it it's not exactly about um drawing perfect perspective but it's about getting things close for like comic books and and children's books where you're stylized and you don't want like an architectural industrial drawing where things are going back to these sharp points and everything is perfect and it looks sterile and i want i want my drawings to have character i want them to have you know the warmth of the human hand and to feel like they're off kilter a little bit and that but but that everything works perspective wise it feels like it's it's in the right perspective but if you checked it with a ruler it might be off a little bit and uh and i i do feel like that definitely adds to my style i don't want my perspective to be perfect but i but i want to follow the rules of perspective to to make a a pleasing drawing and learning these mechanics um and i'll show you um you know i did this uh and i actually made a video about this i did this book my first children's book was armadilly chili and i couldn't even let me throw at that point in my career i couldn't draw in perspective i didn't know i had no idea what i was doing so this i i made a video on this on my youtube channel if you want to go back and and look for it i i corrected my my drawing and this was one of the ones that i corrected but why is this eye on this side of the head you know shouldn't he shouldn't this head kind of come through and then the eye tucked behind it you know and that's not the best fix there but you get it um and you you've got i mean i did that i was a professional illustrator and i made that mistake because i didn't know any better i didn't know i couldn't fix it it didn't look right and i just i couldn't get that three-dimensional quality in you know in drawing a in drawing a head with a three-quarter view and understanding that you know you have an eye line coming through and this i didn't even understand that this eye has to be bigger than this eye over here and that this eye will will turn into an ellipse you know just just simple things like that you know um that center line should be more like there and then you know your nose would be there and i didn't have those mechanics i didn't understand that sort of thing and so um that would be definitely my number three on this list my number two is design composition and i'm i mean i if you don't if you don't understand the difference between drawing and design you don't understand what it is to be a good illustrator period and if you if you're unfamiliar with you know designing and composing a picture get check into a class either you know take mine the creative composition on svs learn or um you know find it find a composition class at your in your art school or wherever you wherever you can can get that kind of training because i'm talking about things like you know avoiding tangency so i've got my cactuses here or cacti these arms are coming up i mean when you see it done well or done right you don't think about it but when you see it done wrong things look clunky like why isn't this cactus right here bumping into this or coming up behind you know i could have easily finished where where this cactus kind of came up here well why didn't i well it would create an awkward kind of union there between these two and it makes it harder for the viewer to understand and comprehend um the visual literacy that's going on in the painting i mean like you're we speak with words we speak with visuals illustrators we that's that's how we communicate and um this is this would be like slurring your words to put this cactus up behind here right and then and then someone's hears you slurring your words and they're like what did you say that's what's going on there visually um uh the the silhouettes that are happening here where this this um this lizard is blending uh silhouette wise and if we zoom out you know you can see what i'm talking about he becomes part of the rock and that's a design element where he's not darker he's not lighter he's the same value because he's in shadow and that's a design element to frame the picture and so i talk about framing um this this this cactus coming up here dark there's a reason why i don't have light things down here in the corner to catch your eye because that would be bad design because i would be that's like a side conversation if you hear if we if we if we go back to um speech and and use that analogy it'd be like you know you're trying to zoom in on or listen to one person talk and there's two other conversations happening the same time that's what would happen if i had light things happening in these shadow areas so i've got all these other little conversations going on and it makes it more difficult to understand what's going on um in the the overall painting um and of course the focal point color that's part of the design um and uh you know the fact that um this this turtle and the camper they fit in between these two cactuses that's no accident when i first started illustrating i thought that great illustrators were just good at creating happy accidents so just everything just sort of worked out for him i didn't realize that in the sketch process you figure all that crap out so as i'm drawing this what you're not seeing is the fact that this cactus was too close over here and this one was bumping in up here and then and then i and then i shorten this one and i move that one over and i make this arm bigger and i i've got my turtle and camper too big so i make him smaller and i fit him in the space and then i don't have a design element over here so i just kind of rough in some rocks and i i just draw that that corner out and i say i'll figure that out later i'll i'll flush in and draw those rocks and then the mountains go in and you know and then and drawing through is another design element where this cloud comes in i didn't start drawing it here i i start my lines way back here and you can't see it because i drew this on the ipad but i start those lines way outside of the picture print frame because the picture window is just a window into the world that's happening lines don't start there lines start outside of that picture they come in and they exit so there's a lot of um again i can't go into all the design stuff my my class is a is like a i believe it's like 14 hours of video so it's it's a lot there's a lot of concepts and a lot of things to learn um and then my number one concept is exactly that it's the concept the idea and the story so those you can use those words kind of interchangeably some some artists will talk about story story story in the animation world that's all they talk about a story but they're also talking about they mean the idea the concept the the creative part of the story um so but they'll hammer story story story so yeah um with this i i believe that if you that the reason that this is the number one is if you don't have a good idea um a good story that you're telling who's gonna care how great it looks i mean you could have the best techniques you could have the best colors you could have the best rendering the end of the day i mean other artists might go oh and all over your your amazing rendering skills and your your great color skills and stuff but if you're not telling a great story the the lay person who can't tell unfortunately you can't tell a good illustration from a bad one they can tell a good story idea and they can tell because it hits them in the heart you know like if if they if they relate to it now a good story isn't going to relate to everyone because we don't all value the same story structures but of the group of people who value the kind of stories that you want to tell those people will you you will be able to you know hit them in a place where that's the point where it becomes art because you you change their emotions you know you you change them emotionally and and they have some kind of they pull something from their past that they relate to it they get it whatever whatever it is you you tug at their heartstrings and you've got them at least for that moment in time you've got them because you told a good story so to me that is the most important thing that you can do and i just fell in love with this idea you may not like this idea but i love it i love that the the turtle is carrying his his shell as a camper now whether he takes you know takes the camper off and um and crawls inside there and sleeps at night i don't know but that that could be you know the next scenes if i ever turn this into a story that could be the thing maybe he gets out and we see his naked little body hopefully he's got clothes on and he goes in the camper and and and and sets up his camp and does it and then the next day he puts the camper shell back on and and continues down the road um so tell a great story and you will definitely tug at their heartstrings these are the 10 things that i think are the most important things that i've learned in becoming a children's book illustrator okay now i told you in the beginning that i was going to talk about children's book pro and the new course and i don't have too many details it is powered by svs svslearn.com and if you want to get the information it's going to launch in may so it's it's launching like right now in the month of may 2021 there's a link in the description and if you click on that it will allow you to sign up to get updates as we release that class and you can find everything out about it we're going to be releasing in the next couple weeks so thanks for watching this video and i hope to see you on the next one

Channel: Will Terry

Views: 78,753

Keywords: sketch, sketches, sketchbook, draw, drawing, drawings, drawn, art, artwork, artist, arts, artworks, paint, painting, painted, paintings, painter, illustration, illustrations, illustrating, illustrator, illustrators, freelance, work, works, job, assignment, business, earn, earning, lesson, lessons, learn, learning, tutorial, tutorials, class, classes, school, schools, education, digital, photoshop, children’s, child, kid, kids, book, books, publishing, publisher, house, color, colour

Id: i613JxFaJzk

Length: 31min 27sec (1887 seconds)

Published: Mon May 03 2021