Anatomy of an illustration job

I'm on a roll with these illustrators shop talk posts! I'm happy to hear that many of you are enjoying them. Over at Illustration for kids, we are talking about Process, I thought I would also post over here too.

Instead of talking about my process in illustrating, I thought I would talk more about the process of an illustration job. For this particular job, it was a map for a kindergarten book.

Sometimes clients send me quick sketches of what they want, and half the time it throws me off. Do they want it exactly like this or is there some room for me to make it my own? It also takes a bit of fun out for me, but other times it just makes the job go smoother. In this case, I get a quick sketch from the client and it works, because I now get an idea of how the layout of the map is like:
With the additional info I get, I use my illustrating power to turn that into this:
I still do pencil sketches. I scan the sketch and place it into Illustrator, where I use to pen tool to draw on top of my sketch. And here is the final:
When there is text in the illustration, alot of times the type will need to be on a separate layer. Voila! Time for another job!

Being Age Appropriate

One thing I've learned as a children's illustrator is being sensitive to your work being age appropriate to the project you are working on. A cute bear you draw might be fitting for a kindergarten book but it might look too young for a 2nd grade book, and vice versa. And of course, you'll need to be able to draw children at different age levels.

For example, here is an initial sketch I did for a math book:
Comment received: too young looking. To make it for a slightly older audience, I've stylized the animals even more, making them less round, the eyes a bit bigger:
The color palette is important to the age appropriate-ness too. For this, I stayed away from my usual color choices and use a more "sophisticated" palette than I am use to:
I hope this is helpful to you as I always love to see someone's behind the scene process. This is something I've picked up along the way as a children's illustrator and was amazed (and surprised) with the intricacies that come along with doing art for children. And I love it!