When it comes to hire an illustrator for a book, first thing comes in mind is that he should be professional and expert in his work. People think that is an east task in which you just have to get right pictures for your content. But it’s not true, illustration is the whole different thing. You just not have to put pictures, but you have to be careful with many things, such as creating stroke palette and color, shading your illustration, keeping control of stroke widths, you must know how to use pathfinder and be aware with all shortcuts to reduce designing time.

Before you start looking for book illustrator for hire or creating it yourself, you must have probably sketched a collection of colors in your mind based on the brand guidelines that you are employed from. I would recommend to try set aside exactly what colors you are using by keeping the palette up-to-date at all times.

What makes an illustrator special?

Professional Illustrators know what and how to deal with your idea. It’s better to leave that job to them, obviously they can do that task it in a better way than us. There are many things that an illustrator must do while designing logos or pictures for the content. So, I’d say that it is better to hire an illustrator for your book than to try creating it yourself.

I still remember I hired two book illustrators twice. They both were too good and it was amazing experience working with them. They made me several pictures and logos in couple of days and when I tried to create a picture myself, it took me a week just to create a single picture.

I usually suggest people to use shading to add more depth and detailing to their product’s illustrations. It’s not that simpletask to do when you are ordinarily using smooth colors. As my shading options, I always use a consistent set of colors. The Stroke color should always be the darkestamong all the colors used in the illustration.

Personal experience

Every Illustrator has its own way to draw or to sketch. Well, I don’t draw illustrations, I actually manipulate shapes to create illustrations.I rarely draw objects using the pen tool when I am illustrating. It’s usually made up of different circles and squares that I have manipulated into shapes. Then I use the pathfinder tool to pattern or combine shapes in the direction I want. Honestly, it is not an easy task to do and it takes time to understand, but once you get comfortable with the tools and know exactly the purpose of each tool, it’s extremely powerful.

I have gotten to the stage where I don’t even realize that I am using shortcuts. Honestly speaking, I can’t even really remember how I learned most of the shortcuts.Pushing objects at the same time as holding ‘alt’ to duplicate them, or holding ‘shift & command’ and pressing ‘}’ to push a layer to the top of the layers, I don’t even realize I do it but I would recommend you learning some of them. It will all become obvious the more you practice. I am not sure what you should learn so this is a kind of pointless point.

I generally follow some of my own created tips that always helped me.

1. Think about your Idea of illustration.
2. Try to draw what you think.
3. Carry out the best idea from all of your good and bad ideas.
4. When doing portraits, try to sketch as big as possible. Small sketches often amplify bugs and mistakes.

So that’s all about it. I amquite sure that I have left out a vast amount of really essential tips and tricks. These are just few of them I felt may be handy to people who are trying to turn their head towards illustrating. Like I said, there is obviously a big learning practice in understanding how to illustrate, and it can be pretty overwhelming. My only piece of advice would be is to just tryillustration and see. No one is going to punch your face for just trying it out. Why not keep pushing yourself if you really enjoy doing it….