Book Review: How to Be a Children’s Book Illustrator: A Guide to Visual Storytelling

How to Be a Children’s Book Illustrator: A Guide to Visual Storytelling is written by children book illustrator Ruth Hammond, and published by 3DTotal Publishing.

It's a 268-page hardcover that covers almost all things you need to know about illustrating children books. It's a rather comprehensive book from what I can tell. The children books and examples featured are for kids 0 - 8 years old.

The book talks about the needs of children from different age group, diversity and culture depending on where the book will be distributed, how to come up with themes, ideas, page layout, and there are also information on promotion, marketing, working with publishers vs self publishing, and the legal bits, like working with contracts.

From page 54 onwards, there are 8 commissioned and fully illustrated children stories included, together with an analysis on how the stories were created, character design and learning goals. The stories are for kids of various age groups (0 to 8) and the subject matter is quite varied which gives you a nice idea on dealing with different subject matter, and things you should look out for. All the stories were written by Greg Dobbins while each story was illustrated by a different artist, namely

• Cris Ramos
• Dapo Adeola
• Saoirse Lou
• Dom Murphy
• Laura Proietti
• Aurélien Galvan
• Kyle Beckett
• Kate Pellerin

If you want to get into children book illustration, this is definitely a book to get. Learning from experienced illustrators can help you save lots of time from figuring things out on your own, from trial and error.

How to Be a Children’s Book Illustrator: A Guide to Visual Storytelling is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP)

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