Creating a Book for Children Using AI Tools (How I Did It)

Part 2: Illustration and design

5 min readApr 7

With the story ready, we can now move to the second part, drawing all the necessary plates and placing them on pages. This is much more like my home territory. I am not a professional book designer per se, but I designed about 70–100 books in my life as a graphic designer, ranging from poetry to photo books. The latter represents the majority since I primarily work as a photographer.

For starters, I asked ChatGPT to generate prompts for MidJourney, which turned out to be pretty useless. Maybe I should have prompted it better, I don’t know, but the results were informative at best. So I skipped that part and moved directly to InDesign.

I sliced up the story manually and placed parts onto pages. Each page should tell another step of the story. The only thing left now was to illustrate each action.

That proved to be much more complex than it seemed.

Creating consistent characters

This is by far the hardest part. The story features the protagonist (the girl named Luna), her little brother Tom and their mother. The first drafts were already OK, so I followed several Youtube and Medium tutorials to make variations of the character and hopefully place them into different sets and environments.

It never worked.

I didn’t mind MidJourney slightly changing their clothes and hairstyles, which I could take into account and tolerate, but the whole drawing style varied significantly, from almost 3D graphic to completely flat, and everything in between. I’ve had a hard time keeping it at least somewhat consistent, and in the end, I had to work with what I’ve got. At the end of the day, I only needed 6 to 7 different poses for the girl and two for each of the supporting characters. But even that was a challenge to achieve.