John Martin walks us through the process of creating a successful children's book and what it really looks like behind the scenes as a children's book illustrator.

Interview Overview

Here are some of the great insights from John Martin in this interview:

More than anything he stressed how powerful and important having a good agent is. They can open doors for you that you don't even know you need to be opening.
When it comes to the success of your projects good character design is so important. You have to remember that with books you're competing primarily against interactive mediums like video games, and what John does to approach his character design is to pull from design ideas that he's seen and loved from all of the different media he's consumed like comic books, television and moves and then stir them all together to come up with his own new ideas. But he doesn't just stop there... he uses a fluid design process where he's not afraid to experiment and try new things to come up with his designs, and he uses textures and patterns that he sees in everyday life to use as the basis for his designs.
Music is another big inspiration for him and he will listen to anything from classical music to rob zombie while he is working and use that to inspire the design process and get into the zone.
The job of a book illustrator is a constant juggle, and this is something we've heard before when talking with Francis Vallejo. When the book comes out, you're in full scale promotion mode to get it out to as many people as possible, and if you're like John and part of a multi-book deal you have to balance juggling the promotion with creating work for the second book.
John also talked a bit about his process where he draws an inks everything traditionally and then brings it all into the computer and turns it into vector, which if you've never heard of vector before is a way of working with images that you can easily scale and reposition your images without losing quality, and he works this way so that during the layout process for the book it becomes very easy for him to react to any changes that are needed while in the layout process.
One of the things that I personally loved about this interview is John's mission to create readers for life. This is no small task when you consider the competition with games and movies for the attention span of kids.