Simplify Your Style for Picture Book Illustration
Do you have a background in fine art, and can render beautiful realistic landscapes and portraits, but struggle to know where to simplify your work for a picture book?
This is an issue that I wrestled with when I started picture book illustration and wanted to share some tips that helped me get started. The good news is that even though you might feel stuck now, you have a great foundation to build a new skill set on, and once you figure your style (i.e. shortcuts) for illustrating out, you’ll have a lot of fun working on books.
The second good news is that there is no one style that works best for picture book illustration so you can be free to be yourself. Different moods in manuscripts call for different kinds of illustrations and they can be completed in variety of different ways; from sketchy and loose pen and ink drawings, to highly rendered digital art, and everything in between. So instead of trying to chase something that doesn’t come naturally to you, spend some time exploring what looks right to you. The best style to illustrate books is the style that you are comfortable drawing in and can execute in a reasonable amount of time.
I wrote down 6 exercises to help you get started on your simplified illustration style. These are what have helped me, and what I still do when generating new character designs.
Veer off a photo reference. Start with a photo reference and spend no more than 10 minutes drawing your character. If you don’t have kids or references of your own, you can search photos from free sites like Pexels.com. After your first sketch, put the photo away, and make a second drawing using the first drawing as a reference, simplifying it a bit. Keep going for a few more rounds, always using your previous drawing as the reference for the next one. Simplifying shapes as you go. This technique helped me a bit, but I still needed more help in figuring out how to simplify details like a nose, or eyes that looked more cute and appropriate for picture books.
Research picture books for new ideas. I use this tip on every project that I do, because I am constantly revising my style and learning new things. To start, visit the library and look for books with illustrations you like. Try to find books that have been published in the last 3 (tops 5) years.
Sketch characters from the books into your sketchbook and make notes on how the illustrator has represented different body parts. Are the eyes a dot, a circle, ovals, more realistic, cartoony? Then take your character and try on different details to see which ones look the best, and feel right for the character.
Trying out different facial features for a grandpa character.
3. Think about body proportions. When looking at the characters others have drawn, What are the proportions of the body parts to each other - look at the head size compared to torso and arms and legs. As a general rule, young kids in picture books have their bodies divided into 3 equally tall parts; the head, torso and legs.
4. Think about facial proportions. In the same way as you are looking at proportions of body parts to another, examine how facial details are laid out inside the head shape. Often the younger the character is, the larger their forehead will be, with the eyes set below the center of the head. As another thing to note for humans, as we age, the bridge of the nose gets longer, so a baby might have their nose almost at the same level as their eyes, but as they age the nose moves down from their eyes.
5. Think about shapes. As you are working on simplifying your illustration style, draw your characters multiple times over in different poses on a page. As you are drawing, think about the shapes that they are made up of, and eliminate extra lines, bumps and details that detract from them. This is especially true for faces and hair. Avoid adding a ton of details to the face because it makes your character look older, and think of the hair as one volume, with some wisps of hair coming out, rather than trying to draw individual hairs.
6. Think about readability.
This relates to the point above. Take one of your character sketches and look at it as a silhouette, can you tell who/what the character is, or are they lost in details and random shapes? Make sure that each main character that you are designing has details about them that separate them from the other characters. These details might be hairstyle, color of clothing, general shape or some other thing like ears or a tail if they are animals.
If you are inspired by these tips, but feel like you need a bit more help, check out my 3-part character design class that’s available at Skillshare and Gumroad. I delve deeper into the topics that I covered in this post, and cover much more, with lots of examples from published books and my own work. The 3 classes cover:
Thanks for reading! Check out my blog for other instructional posts.
