For other posts in this series: part 1 | part two | part three …
After you have completed each page in whatever medium you use (I use pen and ink and watercolor), it’s time to send them off to the art director. The art director will compile your scans of the illustrated pages and will oversee the creation of the book with inserted text. At this point, you certainly hope there will be no requests for changes since this completed page represents HOURS of work.
This is the point where we should talk about the relative merits of working in traditional artistic media versus employing digital means to create book art. That will be a topic for a later blog post.
Anywho, if you’ve done a good job of keeping the art director informed of what your drawings and plans look like, there should be very few incidents where changes might be requested at this point in the process.
Page after page is sent to the art director. All of this is done digitally with attachments to emails or perhaps uploads to a Google drive.
Finally, that glorious day arrives when all of the art is in the “virtual” hands of the art director, and you can sit back and revel in the accomplishment that is illustrating a children’s book.
Detail from a page from A Baby Doll from Santy Claus
The process isn’t quite finished, though, because once the art director and his/her team format the book for printing a series of editorial reviews take place where the entire group of people responsible for the book go over every aspect of the book looking for errors or things that should be changed. This process rarely involves any direct action on the part of the illustrator, though you will probably be included in this review process. This is all just to make sure the book is not printed with any mistakes or aspects that are not up to the standard the publishing company has for their products.
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