Children's Illustration Tutorial: tips for creating characters

Learn the keys to understand and recognize the characters before creating your children's book, with Valentina Toro

Illustrator Valentina Toro (@valentinatorog), passionate about fantasy, enjoys imagining secret worlds and capturing them in images in her illustrated children's books. But every universe is born from an idea, and Valentina spends a lot of time elaborating her characters in their different aspects, both physical and psychological.

In this tutorial, she teaches us the keys to understand her characters and give them several layers of depth when creating her stories.

Find out in the video.

3 tips for creating your characters for children's books

1. Start with the eyes

For Valentina, there is no better way to show a character's expressiveness than through the eyes. Just like eyebrows, they can express their mood or personality with just a few strokes. Play with the positions and sizes of these elements to get totally different results.

2. Make guides for drawing facial features

The vertical and horizontal lines in the center of the face will be important marks to know where to place the eyes, nose and ears, for example, and will offer a more harmonious result.

3. Use the right stroke to emphasize the importance of the character

If your character is a main character, emphasize the details and use a strong and vivid line. If he is accompanied by a non-protagonist, you can try a softer line and a lesser finish. This way you will clearly mark the difference between them. In the example above, Valentina shows a little mouse accompanying the girl she has created and who is the main character. The mouse's strokes are much less vivid, which immediately characterizes it as a secondary character.

Did you like these tips? You can discover with Valentina the world of picture books and learn how to tell stories through images and text in her online course Illustration and writing a children's book.

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