Children's Textbook Illustrations

Some Children's Illustration work I've done. This is an illustration for a children's activity textbook I was working on. In this case, it's a visual exercise for the child to discover the 9 differences between the pictures.

This is the original image.

And this is the other one. Can you find all the differences?

This next image I worked on for the same line of children's textbooks. It's a little bit more elaborate than the previous ones, yet the overall art style remains the same. It's a picture depicting several children performing different kinds of movement for an exercise where the teacher gets his or her students to try performing the same movements in the classroom.

I didn't do a background here to not distract from the purpose of the exercise.

The following image showcases my recent and current preoccupation in my line work regarding mirroring illustrations in published works. Something I feel that a lot of professional artists disregard in their finished art, yet I feel it separates the great ones from the amateurs. Though I by no means consider myself one of the great ones, I still try to incorporate this into my own work whenever possible.

Shortcomings in your work are more evident when you look at it from a mirrored perspective. A drawing will look perfectly fine one way, only to fall apart after you flipped it. I've learned during my years as a magazine designer for Listin Diario that it will sometimes be better to use a mirrored image in the design, in lieu of the original, to better enhance the reader's experience and lead his or her eye into the rest of the article. As a designer, I'd found that I appreciated when other artists I'd worked with made my life a lot easier by providing artwork I was able to "flip" to such ends.

This Picture works from any of these angles.

I chose this next image not because I think it's any good (It's not my best work), but because it subtly showcases something else that I tend to always consider in most of my work. The story. Ask anyone who knows me well, and they'll tell you that beyond being a good graphic Illustrator, I aspire to be a good storyteller. I find that I'm sometimes incapable of just doing the work for the hell of it. Or sitting at a drawing table to just draw and then cash a paycheck. When I'm asked to draw something, I try to do more than just draw what I'm asked to draw. I try to put a little bit more in there. Just not in an obvious way. Sometimes I'm successful and sometimes I'm not. Ideally, I want people to see my work and do more than "see" it. I'd like them to read a story when they look at my drawings.

For this image I was asked to just draw a group of children sitting in a circle. Nothing fancy, since it was for an activity in a textbook I was working on at the time. So that's what I did. But I silently went a little further with that. I fulfilled my obligations, but also attempted to satisfy my own silent needs. Was I successful? I don't know. When you look at this image do you just see a group of kids sitting in a circle? Or do you see something more? 

Can you read a story here?