Helloooo March! I’m late with the blog this month. I hate missing a deadline but it’s better than last month. Last month, there was no blog post!
Life happened. Our situation changed and I ended up making an unexpected move with my husband. We spent the majority of January and February packing, figuring out moving logistics and then unpacking, unpacking, and unpacking some more. It was a lot and that left little, to no, time to write.
Last month’s blog post was supposed to be about how to create unique characters for children’s books (let me know if that still sounds fun to read). I assumed that I would just continue writing on that topic into March. But then something struck me: a feeling that I needed to write about something more relevant to this year’s madness. To quote Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert:
“When an idea thinks it has found somebody -say, you- who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention.”
I often get the question: how can I become a full time illustrator? How can I get to a point where I can quit my day job?
I get messages from artists who are at a point in their children’s book journey where they feel confused about what to do next. So I’m here today, not to write about character designs but to write about all the unexpected twists and turns I had along the way to becoming a full-time children’s book illustrator. I’m hoping that my journey (a journey that never ends btw) can provide a little insight about where a children’s book illustrator’s path can lead.
A Troubled Start in Art School
Let’s start at the beginning. I had always loved drawing so when I was lucky enough to decide where to go to college, I made the decision to attend the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. It was an expensive decision to go to art school and I still have the student debt to prove it, but I loved it. The freedom to explore my creative practice as a young artist was worth it.
After my initial foundation year, I had to decide what art practice I wanted to focus on for the next three years. When I was in high school, I had briefly thought about children’s book illustration as a career but became enamored with illustration in general. So I felt sure that I would major in illustration in college. But I kept on hearing from friends, family and professors how as an illustrator, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to live off. Talk about bad ear worms! My gut told me that illustration was the way to go, but I made the choice to major in Animation in the end. Animators work for studios that give them salaries which seemed like a safer financial choice overall. I’d mark this as the first time I didn’t listen to my gut as an adult and I paid the price. Because, ya’ll, animation was NOT. FOR. ME.
I was a bad animator and student. I didn’t attend classes like I should have, I didn’t put a huge amount of effort into my assignments and I truly ended up wasting a lot of time and money. It felt horrible at the time because I WANTED to be the perfect student, but I couldn’t force myself to spend time doing something that I had absolutely no MOTIVATION for.
A moment that I think back to was when I was on a class trip to an animation festival in Ottawa. I was asked who my animation influences were. Uhhh… no one? I didn’t have any! Looking back, I realize that I already had a major picture book influence, Jon Klassen, but I couldn’t care less about animators!
By the end of my university time, I had an appreciation for animation and animators (because MAN do animators work hard) but I didn’t have a job-ready animation reel or portfolio. All that being said, my animation skill-set helped me develop my children’s illustration portfolio in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated later on in life and I made lifelong friends at that school. It wasn’t all bad!
Some illustration work I made in college that I liked more than my animation reel 😂
My First Job
So there I was, a new artist out in the workforce, hoping to find a job that I was passionate about but that also paid a nice salary. The mythical unicorn of an art career. But that didn’t happen. After graduating from art school, I wasn’t making enough money as a pizza place cashier and a kid’s camp counselor to pay an expensive Boston rent. I boarded a plane along with my beloved cat, Baby, and we flew back to Texas to live with my older brother and his family. “I’ll be there for a few months, maybe a year at most.” I had thought to myself. I had high hopes…
For a little over a month, I was unemployed but applying everywhere. I applied to mainly retail jobs because while I had this degree, I didn’t feel like I was actually good enough to get a job. Like a lot of creatives, I tended to undervalue myself. I was about to accept a position at Bath and Body Works, but then I saw a job posting that caught my eye. Preschool Teaching Assistant? I had been working and volunteering with kids since I was in my early teens, so this felt like a good potential path. After a quick interview, I was in!
I worked for a small independently owned preschool in the outskirts of Houston, Texas and loved it. The kids were so funny and smart and I left work everyday feeling fulfilled. Out of the blue, I felt a spark: I was reading books to the kids everyday. I poured over the art with them, acted out the entirety of WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT, and took notice of which books they liked best. It felt perfect.
Lack of Magic
But it wasn’t right. I still craved that art career I had dreamed of as a teen. Some other aspects of the job started to bother me too: I wanted to have more authority over my work (which eventually manifested into being my own boss) and honestly, I wasn’t making very much money. I was barely making enough to scrape by and I knew that I’d eventually need to be the breadwinner for my future family.
So while I was still at the preschool, I took a leap and started applying for graphic design and animation jobs in the area. I must have applied to at least 20 companies but got a callback to only three. Only one called me back to say that they wanted to hire me. So that’s where I went!
Let me tell you, this was hard to do. I had SO many people telling me to just focus on getting a teaching certificate. It was the easier route they said! And while I think teaching is an amazing career, it’s not what I wanted to do quite yet and I remembered the last time I didn’t listen to my gut.
So there I went, to a national company in their graphic design department. For the first year or so, I felt amazing. I was working in the art industry and finally making enough money to start paying off my student debt. It was freeing.
I was working for a company that mainly made marketing material for car dealerships and I didn’t care about cars at all. I liked learning about graphic design but I had absolutely no motivation for the material I was creating. So once again, I got stuck in a rut. Except this rut stayed with me for the next 3 years.
What now?
Eventually I started feeling really broken down. I was working a full-time job but knew that I needed to get out. I just didn’t know how or where to go. Friends and family started encouraging me to do freelance design so I started exploring that world. Others told me to go into software development because I’d be able to make a lot more money. Sound familiar? But I couldn’t even force myself to start coding. There was NO joy in that for me. I tried lots of different things but nothing serious happened for a couple of years.
Then BOOM, one day I started listening to a children’s illustration podcast at work. Immediately I was hooked. The podcast, Three Point Perspective, was three industry professionals talking about the ins and outs of working as children’s book illustrators.
It literally blew my mind. These guys were talking about what I always wanted to do. They literally laid out a roadmap to becoming a children’s book illustrator and the feeling of “I NEED to do this” hit me so bad, that I couldn’t focus on anything else for a while after that. After some serious conversations with my partner about where this would lead, I decided to take the leap into the children’s book industry, working on that in the evenings and weekends while keeping my day job.
SO! First thing I did was join the SCBWI, which I talk about a lot on this blog. What a life changing event. The first time I attended a meeting, I could feel that I found my community. SCBWI taught me everything I needed to know about the complicated world of children’s publishing. They’re pretty much the best.
From there, things were kind of a blur.
I was still trying to work on doing freelance graphic design as a side hustle. The odd illustration commission slid into my email every once in a while. I joined a critique group and started working on my children’s illustration portfolio and with fear in my heart, started posting my art on instagram. I even participated in Inktober! I told myself that if I could finish a 31 day art challenge then I was SERIOUS about illustration being my new life.
Pulled in Different Directions
The thing is, I wasn’t putting 100% of myself into children’s illustration. I still had those same voices in the back of my head whispering, “How are you going to make a living? How are you ever going to pay off your student loans? How will you support the family that you want to have in the future?” My gut said this was the right path, but everything else said to find a safe way out.
Reluctantly, I started applying to graphic design jobs that were more in line with the industry that I wanted to be in. A good compromise, right? So I applied to a children’s toy manufacturing company. I got a few steps into the hiring process but eventually I got a hard no. I think that was the universe giving me a hint that this wasn’t the right road for me, but like many other times, I ignored that nudge.
A little while after, a friend told me that Highlights was hiring in their graphic design department and it felt like a light in the dark. Working at a children’s magazine with a steady salary? An actual miracle!
Quick note: I had a HORRIBLE graphic design portfolio at this point. The company I was working for had a clause in their contract stating that their employees couldn’t share any work created there publicly, so my portfolio was just a few graphic design bits and bobs that I had cobbled together over the years. It was paltry at best, but I decided to apply to the Highlights job anyway.
My Big Break, or So I Thought…
Because of my lack of credentials, I decided I needed to do something big to get Highlight’s attention. I created and illustrated a cover letter that mimicked the classic highlights magazine and oh boy, did it get their attention. A day after sending in my cover letter, I got a call back. They loved it! And they wanted to see more.
Funny story: At one point, I was asked if I actually created the cover letter I submitted. And I can’t blame them for wondering! I think they could see the effort I put into my illustration work but they couldn’t see the same thing in my graphic design work.
Happily though, I received several calls back from the hiring manager. After completing a few graphic design tests for the company, I felt sure that I was getting the job. I started telling my family and friends that I was moving to Pennsylvania to work at this amazingly cool children’s magazine company. But then I got the call that I was dreading. Highlights decided to go in a different direction.
And with this rejection, I was absolutely crushed.
I was spending 60+ hours a week working my day job, freelance jobs, and applying to jobs. Nothing that I was doing seemed to be working. The universe obviously had different plans for me.
Enjoying the Journey
In the end, it was meant to be.
Losing the job opportunity at Highlights was so devastating that it made me rethink my intended career path. I had a long talk with my partner about what to do next and what I really wanted to focus on. What were my priorities?
While I was working to get hired at Highlights, I had submitted my portfolio to my local SCBWI conference and won the portfolio award. So things were moving along, but I realized that I was stretching myself too thin. Even though it felt wrong and like I was throwing away a huge potential income stream, I stopped working on graphic design completely and focused only on my kidlit portfolio. I was still at the day-job, but outside of those eight hours, I honed in on making my own picture book dummies.
Taking A Leap of Faith
What a huge change! I felt happier because my brain wasn’t stretching itself in 20 different directions. I still had those voices telling me this was a bad idea but shooed them away and embraced the fact that I was on this path and only this path. I was now going to do everything in my power to become a children’s book illustrator. And those voices were a lot quieter than my gut who kept on saying, “Go, go, go!”
I attended every SCBWI meeting I could and started reaching out to illustrators I admired to gleam any bit of knowledge from them. I started receiving small local freelance jobs for children’s illustration more often and I took any opportunity I could find to showcase my portfolio.
Soon after I made this decision, a friend (the same friend who told me about Highlights, yay for kidlit friends!!) told me about a twitter pitch contest called #dvpit that she thought I should participate in. It was for diverse authors and illustrators to showcase their story pitches and portfolios to agents and editors on twitter. Because of my hispanic background, I decided to join in.
Like previous times in my life, it felt like my portfolio wasn’t good enough to get me into the industry, but darned if I cared because I KNEW this was the life I needed to live.
I’m convinced that being successful in the children’s book industry is 10% sweat, 20% luck, 2% skill, and 110% pure determination/risk-taking. Because when I put my work on twitter, it started getting attention. Around a dozen literary/art agents liked my post which indicated they were interested in representing me. I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.
I was convinced that my portfolio was bad, but the universe proved me wrong.
I had about three agents that I ended up seriously talking to. It was an actual dream come true! In the end, I went with my amazing agent, Kelly Sonnack, and we started formulating my next moves to get illustration work. She was helping me create my own career map.
Where I Am Now
A lot happened in between getting an agent and now:
I had signed on with Kelly with a rough picture book dummy I was working on and she was able to sell that within the year.
I put my portfolio in a Los Angeles SCBWI showcase and won an honour which got the attention of a few editors at major publishers. Another win for taking risks!
I left my day job after getting my first round of book deals.
I have three children’s books out in the world, two of which got the #1 slot on NY Times Bestseller list and the third recently winning a Golden Kite Award Honor.
I’m working on a few more picture books for publishers and have spent time developing my own picture books and a potential graphic novel.
I’ve done freelance illustration work for Highlights! They were great to work with and I’m a lot happier being on the illustration side of things :)
These are only a few things that have happened in the past two years. They are really great, wonderful things, but I still have to focus on what my gut is telling me to do on a daily basis. Sometimes, I make the wrong decision. Or I don’t want to take a risk! Geez, sometimes I just want to fall on my couch, cozy up with a Netflix show and eat cookies. But I keep on going and remember the journey that brought me to where I am today. And I remember how this path finally feels right.
4 Big Takeaways from My Journey
Here are some takeaways from my weird and winding road to children’s illustration that I hope can help you:
Take risks: Network in your local community, put your portfolio in a showcase, send out postcards to art directors and editors and/or start a social media account!
Name your influences: If you find that you don’t have any children’s book influences, maybe rethink your priorities.
TRUST. YOUR. GUT.
Remember that each person’s journey is going to be different: I don’t have kids or a big family to think about yet, but lots of people do! You might live in a country where accessing community groups is harder. Whatever the situation, do what is best for you.
I hope what I’ve shared with you has been helpful, hopeful, or at the very least, entertaining. Good luck along the way, and don’t forget that you can always reach out to me to share your own experiences. I’d love to hear them ❤️
I’m in a new office now and I wanted to share a cute photo of my setup but instead, I have this! A messy but realistic studio :)