Writing and illustrating My First Children's Picture Book

 A few years ago, my oldest child (who was then a toddler) tried to put some shoes on a toy dragon. They didn't fit, and I jokingly said, "Dragons don't wear shoes," and then thought, That's got a catchy beat to it. During some down time, I came up with other mythical beings and the clothes they wouldn't wear and made it into a poem with the idea of creating a children's book.

However, I'm not an artist, and I knew I would have to ask someone to illustrate the book for me, but I wasn't sure I was ready to pay for such a thing. So the poem sat on my phone for months and then years, unpublished.

This year, I felt that I really wanted this book to happen. I don't know why, maybe it's because I wanted to have a new book published but knew that my current WIPs need a lot more work before I would even consider publishing them. I haven't gotten much writing done in the last year (see my writing hiatus post) and it would be nice to feel like an author again. Or maybe having a new baby has made me realize how quickly my first baby has grown and I'm having a mid-life crisis and desperately want all of my projects finished right now. Whatever the case, I was determined to get this children's book published.

The words were all done, the next step was an illustrator. I decided to write down exactly what I wanted in each picture, which ones I wanted to be a single page, which should be double, and got a rough idea of the layout of the book. Next I went to Fiverr to find an illustrator, someone who would do it for fairly cheap but still produce something nice. I found a few people whose style I liked and whose prices were reasonable and contacted one.

I sent a message through Fiverr to this illustrator stating how many illustrations I wanted, how many would be two page and how many would be single page images, and how many characters would be in each image. I asked if he could give me a rough estimate for this and he quickly responded that my idea sounded great and he would love to help me out. He asked me to tell him about my book. I had kind of already explained it was a book about mythical beings and the clothes they do and don't wear, so I thought maybe he wanted an outline of the plot. But my book is more of a list than a story so I told him it was a poem. I also provided the first stanza as an example. Again, he quickly responded and said my idea sounded great, then asked me to send him the text. 

This is where I started to feel uneasy. He was asking for a lot of information but still hadn't given me a quote for his services. I had already told him how many illustrations I needed, why did he need the whole text to tell me how much it would cost? 

I know this might sound paranoid, but if I handed over my entire book, he could easily ghost me, make illustrations to match the text, and sell it himself. His Fiverr profile indicated he didn't live in the US, and I didn't know anything about him beyond an internet persona, so I had almost no chance at settling things in court if it came to that.

Maybe he was a perfectly nice guy who didn't realize how shady he seemed, but my first question had been how much will you charge me and he still hadn't answered that. So I moved on.

But with my now paranoid brain scanning illustrator profiles, I suddenly felt like everyone on Fiverr could be out to scam me.

My next plan was to reach out to author friends in my writing Facebook groups and see what illustrators they had used, and how they had found them. But the responses I got were for illustrators that mostly seemed to do cover art for books, and they weren't in the cartoony children's style I was hoping for. Someone suggested going to a Facebook group dedicated to children's book illustrators, but warned me that there could be scammers on there.

Aah! They're after me!

My paranoid brain almost imploded.

At this point I was afraid to ask anyone I didn't know by name to help me out. But I also knew that if I asked a friend I would be entering into a business deal with them. Long story short, I've had several experiences where I had a friend do work for me and I wasn't pleased with the result, but I didn't want to hurt their feelings because I didn't want to hurt our relationship, so I just smiled and paid them and left unhappy. I've sworn off doing business with friends.

So here's where I become a great big hypocrite.

Remember when I wrote that post about AI chatbots and how they can't innovate and we need to mostly consume human-made stuff to show that's what we really want and not get trapped in a world of repetitive stories? It probably sounded like I think AI shouldn't be used to create media, huh?

Well, I decided I would use AI art to illustrate my book.

And, guys, it's actually rather fulfilling.

Here's the thing about AI art generators. They can't innovate, either. I logged into Leonardo.Ai, typed in "Dragon wearing shoes, claws poking out of shoes," and and it gave me a dragon, but no shoes. Because dragons don't wear shoes, obviously. 

This happened with almost every one of my pictures. I used two different AI art generators (Leonardo.Ai and Stable Diffusion) and neither knew how to combine the two ideas I would give it. A dragon with shoes? A unicorn with a hat? A fairy with a jacket? How do I do that? Sometimes one or the other didn't even know how to make the mythical creature I asked it for. Neither seem to know what a griffin is.

So then I learned how to use photo editing software. I would get a decent picture of the mythical creature I wanted (usually after several iterations) from one or the other AI art generator, and then get a separate picture of the clothes I wanted it to wear, put them together in Photopea (a free, online version of Photoshop), and do another iteration in the AI art generator so they would look like they belong together. Then there was usually more editing to be done, little tweaks if I found that the AI was focusing on a small error in the picture and making it way more obvious, and back and forth until I got something I liked. 

Started with this

Ended with this

I learned a ton about the various tools you can use in Stable Diffusion in particular to get what you want. OpenPose helps with posing characters a certain way, Inpainting can redo one small part of the picture (or preserve one part while changing the rest), Reference will create a character that looks like one you provide, and the various Checkpoints can control the style of your image or tell Stable Diffusion how to make certain creatures (without those I wouldn't have been able to make a centaur or a unicorn).

I still would consider myself a novice at this, but I was quite proud of what I was able to do. It was a ton of work, though a real artist would probably say it's much harder to make something original. To that I would say, not if you're completely art impaired like me. I tried to draw a unicorn. Just... just look at it, guys.

I didn't bother with ears or eyes. I knew it was a lost cause

AI art let me create something I never could have done on my own, and although I know I didn't technically make those illustrations, I put in enough work editing and tweaking to feel like I did. 

So, maybe I'm not totally a hypocrite?

Next time, I'll tell you about the next part of my publishing journey: formatting.

Also, please make sure to order a copy of the book on Amazon, available Sep 18!