Children's Book Illustrator Portfolio
Essential advice for illustrators on building an online home for your art to prepare for querying art reps or literary agents.
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Children's Book Illustrator Portfolio video Transcript
Hello. This is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Sorry, I just love my new video corner. I'm so thrilled. Anyway, so here is a video for children's book illustrator queries. Mouthful, but our illustrators need love, too. So, I'll be discussing what you want to have in order to query for representation, either with a literary agent or an art representative.
Now, the difference between an art rep and a literary agent is that literary agents are more tuned to making book deals and are better suited for author-illustrators. If you have book properties that you are bringing to the table, where you have the story and the writing done, then a literary agent is a better bet. If you are strictly an illustrator, you may look at an art rep.
Now, an art rep represents illustrators and their primary job is to get you in front of art directors, editors, and publishers, for the sake of getting paired on a book project. You're not necessarily representing your own project so it all depends. If you're an author-illustrator, maybe an agent is a better fit. If you're looking for just illustration jobs, then an art rep might be a better fit. Sometimes, there are agencies that have both available and provide both services. So when you're researching agents, when you're researching art reps, you can look at different agencies and see what their wheelhouse is.
So, how we query these people, the number thing that you're up against here is the no attachments rule. So that means if you're sending an email query to somebody, you're filling out a query form, there's usually no way to attach something. Well, I mean, you can attach something to an email but a lot of agents will say, "No attachments, please." And so, where does that leave you? I would strongly recommend that the number one thing you do, today if possible, if you don't already have it, is a portfolio of your art, so you can throw it on Squarespace, you can throw it up on Wix, you can throw it up on another web client, make a WordPress site, basically anything to get your art hosted, so that means stored somewhere else. Then, you can provide a link to that art, wherever it's hosted, whether it's Dropbox. Then you provide a Dropbox link so that they can view or download the art or a link to the art hosted somewhere. It can be hosted on a URL that's not accessible from the rest of your website if you don't want to show it to the world. It can be password protected but however you're gonna do it, your job is, in your query to an agent, to an art rep, to get them to look at your portfolio without crashing their inbox. And what that means is you don't want to send, because images, especially high-quality images, tend to be big file sizes. You don't want to crash their inbox. I'm not saying one PDF is going to crash somebody's inbox, but when you think that they get 40,000, 50,000, 60,000 submissions per year, that's gonna be a lot of email space taken up if everybody is sending attachments. And so, they just say, "No, thank you. If we want to see something, we'll ask for it." So your job is to be able to show them your work in a way where you don't also crash their inbox for their email server.
So basically, throw it up online. Make it look nice. Make it look clean. Make it intuitive to use. Make it intuitive to access. I would set up a gallery that they can click through. And the things that I would strongly recommend is that you, as an illustrator putting together a query for a literary agent, is three types of illustrations in your portfolio. So the first type would be your characters, your emotions. Picture books are all about the character, all about the visual, all about conveying emotion and storytelling with your character's face and your character's body. So that is the number one thing that you want to demonstrate: how you do characters, how you do faces, how you do emotion, how you do bodies in motion because we don't want to see illustrations that are just static of a character, you know, standing there. We want to see them dancing and doing all of these other things like kids do that you will want to do in your picture books. This is specifically for children's illustrators.
The second thing that you want to convey is a sense of your style, and whether that's your color style, your black and white style, whatever you think conveys your style the best. And if you have multiple styles, then include examples of the different styles that you work in, in your portfolio.
And the third would be your media. So if you do watercolor but you also do charcoal, if you do digital illustration and also mixed media, whatever the case may be, you want to give them a sense of all of the mediums that you work in.
So we have your sense of character, you have your sense of style, and tone is very, very important in illustration, as well as the medium in which you work or multiple mediums. And again, if you do multiple styles, you want to represent the styles that you are most looking to do, if hired. So if you have this one really crazy, experimental Picasso-type style and you wouldn't mind working in it, but you really are looking for work in your watercolor, include more watercolors in your portfolio.
And another thing that is crucial to demonstrate that you can do, because this is like your audition, right, is this idea of consistency. Because for a picture book, you are going to have to draw the same character and the character is gonna have to look the same, at different angles, doing different poses, with different facial expressions. And I see a lot of portfolios where the character is meant to be the same character, but they look completely different on every single page. And that is not going to instill a sense of, "Oh, this illustrator can really deal with proportion. They can really put their characters in motion and have continuity." So continuity is something that anybody who evaluates your portfolio will be looking for.
I think that's a really good sense of being an illustrator who reaches out for literary representation, whether from an agent or from an art rep. And get yourself out there, without crashing anybody's inbox.
This has been Mary Kole and Good Story Company, and here's to a good story.
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