Hiring an Illustrator

With the manuscript in order, thanks to the the help of my editor and mentor Betty Larrea, I began to look for an illustrator. I quickly became overwhelmed with all the choices! If you go to one of the many Facebook groups for children’s authors and say you are looking for an illustrator, you will be inundated with offers. I went on Etsy and looked at so many artists. Then there are websites that represent illustrators. How do you even start to decide? Who will be able to see what you see in your mind’s eye when you read your manuscript? Did I want it to look whimsical? or realistic? Cartoonish? Digital, or water color? I didn’t even know what I was looking at when I was looking!

But eventually I found an artist, (on Etsy) that had done a few kids books and had some really sweet looking children in her portfolio. Bonus was that she had a yoga coloring book! So I knew that she was familiar with basic yoga poses. Her name was Timna Green, and she lived in Israel. But since we were doing everything online anyway, that didn’t really matter (except that she was 7 hours ahead of me, so I had to get up early in the morning to communicate with her if I wanted anything done that day!) We signed a contract in June, and started working on the opening spreads of the book. Thank goodness for Google Drive!

She asked me to take pictures of myself doing the yoga poses that I wanted in the book, and send them to her. She then had her kids do the poses, and sent them back. So that way, we knew we were on the same page, so to speak! The yoga pose poem pages were fairly easy to figure out. We had a little harder time with the opening spread, as there were a lot of details to work out. My favorite spread is the last one, the big rainbow with the kids doing their rainbow pose! It became the cover of the book as well. You can find Timna at @timnagreenz_art.