All illustrations work is not the same as doing illustrations for children’s books. You might be good at making advertisement illustrations but it does not necessarily mean that you will do well in making illustrations for children’s books as well. To illustrate a children’s book, you don’t just need to make a beautiful artwork but also narrate the story through it and make expressive and sequential illustrations. Once you have decided to become a children’s book illustrator, the next most important step if creating your children’s book illustration portfolio
We will give you some tips here on how to create your online illustration portfolio.

What to put in your children’s book illustration portfolio?

• Having a variety of children book illustration styles in your portfolio is very important as it gives the authors/publishers to look at the range of skill set you have and showcases your ability to work on various genres of children book stories.
• Your portfolio should have illustrations from real books, or if you are new have illustrations done for creating imaginary characters and setups.
• Don’t worry about the tends, if digital is more popular or traditional. Go ahead and make the illustrations as per your skill set, make the ones you are best at.
• Your portfolio should never have an illustration with which you are not completely satisfied. Follow the old saying: your portfolio is only as good as the worst piece in it! Put your best children’s book illustrations in your portfolio. Always prefer quality over quantity.
• It’s a good idea to not just have a variety of styles but also a variety of objects/scenarios in your book. Like if you have done some books on dog, it will not be good to put more and more dog images in your portfolio rather, put illustrations done on other subjects. Some common categories for children’s books are: Fantasy, Animals, Kids, Multi-cultural, Family, Abuse, Loss-Grief, Seasons, Nature, Earth, Underwater, Moon, farm and many more
• Children’s books are also about expressions. Since expressions are the life if children’s book illustrations, show a variety of expressions of the same characters you did.
• Adding some text along with your illustrations do add the narration to the illustration and the author is able to understand your skill and creativity better.
• Make sure you organize your portfolio in pages or folders for the ease if viewing.
• Also, to give a complete idea to the authors/ publishers, add variety of sizes of illustrations like half page with text- full page illustrations, spread illustrations or small spot/ vignette illustrations.
• Keep updating your portfolio and make sure you remove the old ones because adding more and more number can become very difficult for your audience to browse. Also, your style will keep on evolving with your experience, so its best to keep the latest and the best ones.