I want to write about the experience of illustrating a children's picture book digitally, from the initial contact to the printed book.

The brief: 32 pages, full color, 8x10 inches at 300dpi. The art director sent reference mood boards and a loose style guide. No specific artistic instructions beyond 'warm and playful.'

The process: I did style development thumbnails for three weeks before any final art. The publisher wanted to see how the main characters looked in multiple poses and lighting conditions before committing. This phase was the most important and the most unglamorous — dozens of rough drawings that would never appear in the book.

The production phase: each spread had three stages — rough, color comp, final. The color comp stage was where most revisions happened, which is the right stage for that. By final, the structural decisions were locked.

The timeline: six months from first brief to final file delivery. This is fast for a picture book. Three months of that was revision cycles.

What I know now that I wish I'd known: the art director relationship is everything. A good art director makes the revision process collaborative. A misaligned one makes it adversarial. This one was excellent.