How we illustrate a children's book.

Every project opens with a 30-minute conversation. We want to hear the story in your own voice — the one-line pitch, the character you love most, the feeling you want a parent to have after closing the book.

You send us the manuscript (or a working draft). We read it slowly, twice, and come back with the single most important question: who is this book for? Age band, tone, length, and distribution plan. That answer shapes every decision after.

We recommend one of our six signature styles and explain why. You see a single concept sketch of your cover or hero spread in that style — enough to feel the aesthetic, not so polished that changing direction feels expensive.

This is the most important checkpoint in the whole project. Once we agree on style, everything downstream becomes a craft problem rather than a taste problem.

We work in two passes. First, rough spreads: gray-scale compositions of every page, showing where characters are, where text sits, and how the eye moves. You review all of them at once.

Then full color. Cover first, then interior spreads in story order. You see batches of 4–6 spreads at a time, with two rounds of revisions per spread included. We keep character sheets open on a second monitor the whole time so your protagonist looks like themselves on every page.

Final files, packaged the way you need them. Print-ready PDF at your trim size with bleed and crop marks. KDP-compliant fixed-layout ebook. Individual spread exports in PNG and high-res JPEG for marketing. A title page. A dedication page.

We also send a one-page style guide — a PDF you can keep alongside the book for press kits, author visits, and any future sequels we (or someone else) might illustrate. Your book's visual language, documented.