hi guys my name is Bethany autos I'm the author of Evelyn's number and the confident Corgi don't know alright if you're here you probably know that this is the third video in my series on how to write a children's book but today we're going to focus on the artwork the illustrations this video can apply to you whether you're going to hire someone or whether you're going to do it yourself I'm gonna talk a little bit about both make sure you guys stay tuned till the end because I have a bonus tip for you first of
all if you don't feel skilled or comfortable in creating the artwork for your book I'm gonna have to be really honest here with you guys and I'm gonna say don't don't do it hire somebody or you could collaborate with an artist to actually write and illustrate the book together and then share the profits this is because if you're not skilled in this area or if you feel uncomfortable it's going to show and you want to make the best book possible kids and adults both care very much if the art is good and artwork is at
least 50% if not more of the story to most kids so this may mean that you need to make some room in your budget for hiring an illustrator and that's totally okay I think it's a worthwhile investment and I'm gonna talk more about that it's going to make your book ten times better it's gonna be that much more amazing so okay a lot of you are probably like Bethany um you did your own cover and your own interior like it says illustrated by your right if you're wanting to create a career for yourself in children's
books if you're wanting to become a well-known author and it's your dream to write children's books and it's your main passion then that's when you need to invest in it and make it the best it can possibly be however if you are writing this children's book for family and friends you still want it to be really good but you also can find ways to make things yourself especially because it will definitely help out your budget to do some things yourself and I want to help you still do that to the best of your ability and
make it the absolute best that you can if you do decide to make it on your own aisle and somewhere in the middle but more towards the family and friend side with this book because my main focus in my career is in writing young adult fiction and so writing children's books is a fun extra that I feel excited about though I guess before I even go into the how to design and create the artwork for your book yourself I would just say consider where you want this book to go and that will really help you
make your decision so what are your ultimate goals with it so for me I'm just putting out a fun book on the side that I really worked hard on and I know is amazing and fun but it's not my main thing you know it's not it's like a side thing so I don't have a budget for it in my business like I honestly literally have only spent I think I did $5 to use a website called be funky to put a cartoon filter on all my pictures and then I have spent probably a total of
about twenty to twenty-five dollars on ordering proofs from create space until I've got the book that I want so I ordered a couple different versions and then I would fix it and then I would order it again so all total I've only spent $30 on this book I'm not throwing a huge budget at it because it's not my career but that is not to say that just because you're not putting a lot of money into it that you shouldn't put a lot of time into it because that is a whole other ballgame you should invest
a lot of time into making this good I personally believe that if you're going to write a kids book you need to do it to the best of your ability use the budget that you have and then use all the resources that you have used the friends that you have used your ability to learn and to do the research and to make it best that you can so anyway I'm gonna get off my soapbox let's talk about some ways that you can do the artwork yourself some things for you to consider and I want to
preface this whoo with only consider these if you feel comfortable and skilled at them I would say you could choose painting of all different kinds you could do acrylics you could do watercolor you could do oils you could also draw your pictures you could sketch them with pencils you could use charcoal or crayons even again only if they're going to be amazing like don't do some crappy napkin drawing okay if you have talents in something I say use that so I'm an amateur painter I do have some paintings out but I still don't feel good
enough to make a children's bike at least not yet so I didn't even consider that I actually ended up using photos and this is something you can do as well you can use real-life photos and then put different kinds of filters on it to make it look more like your typical children's book so when I took all these books out from the library and more I found that there weren't any at least that I know of that are actual real life pictures so that immediately made me take a look at the these are the real
like unedited pictures of penny and think how can I make this more like a children's book I chose to use a couple websites the first one that I used is called be funky calm but I'm sure that you can look up other websites too and you can I just search make a photo or cartoon they have a bunch of different filters for this particular website like I mentioned already you have to pay I think it's five bucks for I got a month membership I kind of went back and forth between this website and my other
website but you could put all your pictures through one and then bring them over to the other you got to do what works for you I will say really quickly this is just a bonus tip it's probably going to take you at least twice as long to do your work as you expect it to just throwing that out there I recommend looking for different websites to get the kind of filter and look on your photos that you want if you choose to go with photos and then once you have your artwork whether it's you know
the paintings drawings or the actual pictures you can use a website called canva a lot of people use this for different kinds of graphic design they use it to promote things to do advertisements but one side note you can also use it to take your artwork and then add your text to the artwork okay so this is not a canva tutorial I'm not gonna go super in-depth on how to use it but basically one really quick tip is to figure out what size you want your kids book to be for example I chose to have
my kids book be a square so I think it was eight point five by eight point five on create space and we'll go into that more in detail this week but whatever size you choose you'll want to use that size in canva and you can use custom dimensions so you can size it to exactly what you need then you're going to upload your photos and then you're going to add text to it and this is really easy you guys but a couple quick notes that people don't think of there's so many options on canva that
it can be really fun to play with it and get all into it I would say number one choose one font like just one and keep all your text that font because even though it's fun to get all over the place it's very unprofessional so take your time picking a font that you like that feels like a children's book it's usually kind of bolder and more fun and then number two once you pick a font I would recommend picking just one color for your font and kind of sticking with that throughout as well again it
just gives it more of a professional look to your story okay my bonus tip is that kids love details so the more detailed that you can make your artwork the better because just picture them if they're reading it and they're catching new things each time they read through it and they're like looking at the picture and finding new details they're gonna keep asking their parents to read it again and again and again they're gonna be like let's read that book again and they're gonna like look for new things in the artwork oh and you know
what I have a second bonus tip I would also say just like with the actual story itself run the artwork by kids like show it to kids see if they'll like it seriously this is basically like telling you to have people pay to read your book and that is their beta readers you should have beta reader okay guys just a reminder the giveaway is still going on across all social media the links for the giveaway are below and just a refresher it's three steps step one is to post a picture of the Corgi book right
here somewhere on your social media step two is to tell everyone how excited you are for it and step three is to just simply send me a photo of your post so that I know to include you in the giveaway drawing the links for that art below just follow the links like all the links okay guys that's everything I hope you have an awesome day and I'll see you again very soon like tomorrow
