Muddy Colors
by Dan dos Santos and contributors · Muddy Colors
A collective blog where twenty-plus working illustrators, among them Dan dos Santos, Greg Manchess, Paolo Rivera and art director Lauren Panepinto, post near-daily on process, composition, materials, art direction and the economics of an illustration career. A decade-plus archive of professionals explaining specific finished commissions - reference, thumbnails, art-director notes, revisions - which is the closest thing online to watching real jobs get made.
More resources on Illustration
The Illustration Department Podcast
Giuseppe Castellano, an art director for nearly twenty years at Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, interviews illustrators, agents and editors about how children's-book, editorial and publishing assignments are won, briefed, revised and paid. Gives the buyer's side of the transaction, which almost no illustrator-made content does: what an art director looks for in a portfolio, why a submission is passed over, how briefs and revisions actually run.
3 Point Perspective: The Illustration Podcast
Working illustrators Jake Parker, Lee White, Samantha Cotterill and Anthony Wheeler talk through craft and the business around it: portfolio decisions, style development, agents, contracts, pricing and marketing, plus interviews with full-time picture-book illustrators. Episodes are about decisions - what belongs in a portfolio, how to price, when a style is actually working - not software steps.
Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing & Ethical Guidelines, 17th Edition
The Guild's reference on what illustration work is worth and how to contract for it: rate and salary data by market, copyright and licensing, negotiation, sample contracts, and a 2025 chapter on generative AI and artists' rights.
Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children's Books
Caldecott medalist Shulevitz covers picture-book making end to end: telling a story visually, pacing across page turns, dummy and layout planning, character and setting, and preparing art for reproduction, with an appendix on finding a publisher. The reference text for narrative illustration: it treats the book as a designed sequence rather than a set of pretty pictures, which is exactly the discipline gap between drawing and illustrating.
Picture This: How Pictures Work (25th Anniversary Edition)
Molly Bang rebuilds Little Red Riding Hood from cut-paper shapes to show how size, placement, colour and contrast create feeling. A short, exercise-driven account of why a picture reads the way it does. The single best answer to 'why does this image feel dangerous / calm / unstable?' It teaches seeing and decision-making rather than tools, and its conclusions are demonstrated rather than asserted. I