How to Illustrate a Children's Book in Procreate

A children's book is the project people carry around for years without starting, usually because they picture the finished thing: thirty polished paintings, a printed cover, a story that works. The actual process is far less romantic and far more doable. You design one character, sketch one rough dummy, finish one spread at a time, and only at the very end worry about print files.

This is the shape of Freya's Children's Book Illustration in Procreate course, and three of its lessons cover the stages that matter most: character design, the book dummy, and file prep for publishing.

Design the character across its whole story

The course's example book follows a little seed that grows into a blossoming tree, and the character design lesson doesn't design a seed. It designs five stages of the same character: seed, sprout, young tree, mature tree, and finally a tree covered in pink blossoms.

The craft moves are worth copying for any book character.

Start from research, then push toward cute. Freya looks at real seeds and sprouts first, then simplifies: rounder shapes, a pair of cotyledon leaves like soft hair, little legs that will later become roots, a simple dot-and-curve face. Stylized illustration doesn't need realism; it needs a shape kids can recognize and root for.

Evolve by duplicating, not redrawing. Each growth stage starts as a duplicate of the previous stage's layers. Erase the sprout, draw a flower bud; erase the legs, draw roots. The silhouette changes, but because it grew out of the same drawing, it still reads as the same character.

Keep the anchors constant. The eyes, the gentle smile, the surface markings and the color scheme survive every transformation. Freya is explicit about why:

"It's also important to note that consistency is key when it comes to illustration because kids tend to zero in on repeating patterns. This helps develop the emotional attachment they have to your character and will make your story more immersive."

Freya, in Designing Your Main Character, Children's Book Illustration in Procreate

Annotate your character sheet. Next to the stage drawings, Freya adds close-up details (a fully bloomed flower beside the closed bud) and written design notes, so that months later, mid-book, you remember why a feature looks the way it does. Her blossoms, by the way, are invented: four petals borrowed from a clover for luck, the mood borrowed from cherry blossoms. Made-up botany is allowed when it carries meaning.

The dummy: sketch the whole book badly, on purpose

A book dummy is a set of quick sketches showing how every page will look, art and text together. It's the tool you use to fix pacing problems while they're still cheap to fix, and it's what you'd show an editor or publisher. Freya's rule for it: casual and expressive, nothing polished.

Her template is a canvas of eight rectangles, each one an open spread, giving a 16-page story. Four printing terms live on that template, and you'll meet them again at the printer, so learn them here: bleed (the outer zone that gets trimmed off), trim (the final page edge), safe margin (where all important art and text must stay), and gutter (the middle where pages bind, no important detail allowed).

Then comes the move that turns a manuscript into a book: cut your story into 16 pieces. Freya imports the written story as an image and slices it with the Selection tool, placing each piece above its spread. Her advice for deciding where to cut: read the story several times to feel its rhythm, keep the key scenes that push it forward, keep sentences short, and trim anything repetitive.

With text placed, sketch each scene loosely. A few of her staging choices show how much storytelling lives in the thumbnails: wind drawn as curved lines flowing across both pages of a spread to connect them, a worm's-eye view that makes an ancient tree feel giant, a storm spread that earns its drama because we've spent pages watching the tree grow sturdy, and time passing shown by duplicating a drawing and changing small details. She also color-codes the dummy itself, sketching the main character in pink and surroundings in green so it can be found at a glance during review.

One discipline runs through the whole lesson: leave room for the text while you sketch. At the end, she marks every text area with placeholder lines and rectangles, single lines for short text, blocks for long, so the layout is decided before any final art exists.

Files that survive the printer

The publishing module is taught by a guest, Cristian S. Aluas, a professional artist who has been publishing for around twenty years, and it's the unglamorous knowledge that saves your book at the last step.

In Procreate, set up final art at real book size: 8.5 x 8.5 inches at 300 DPI, a standard square children's book format for Amazon's KDP, in RGB (KDP prints from RGB, not CMYK). 300 DPI is the print-quality line; Procreate will trade layers for resolution, and at this setting you still get a couple hundred layers, far more than an illustration needs. Export finished pages as PNG rather than JPEG for quality, or as PSD if you need the layers elsewhere.

Then two format facts. PDF is for print. For the digital edition, export a fixed layout EPUB, never reflowable. Reflowable EPUB lets reader apps resize and reflow text, which is right for novels and disastrous for picture books: the text detaches from the art and lands somewhere random on every device. The module shows the same book both ways on a tablet, a phone and an e-reader, and the reflowable version is broken on all three. Preview before you upload, in Kindle Create or Kindle Previewer (both free), or by sending the EPUB to your own tablet and opening it.

One more decision from those previews: spreads look better in print, but single-page layouts read larger on phones and tablets, so many books need both versions.

The honest timeline

Nothing above is technically hard in Procreate. Duplicating layers, the Selection tool, a canvas at the right DPI: you likely know every tool already. What the process demands is sequence and patience, doing the character sheet before the pages and the dummy before the finals, so the hundreds of hours of painting land on a story that already works.

These three lessons sit inside Freya's full Children's Book Mastery program, which walks the whole road from story outline to a finished, uploadable book. If a picture book is your someday project, the character design lesson is a very gentle place to make it a today project.