Skip to main content
PodcastintermediateFree

The Illustration Department Podcast

by Giuseppe Castellano · The Illustration Department

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.

Visit resource

More resources on Illustration

WebsiteFree

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.

PodcastFree

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.

Book

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.

Book

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.

Book

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

See all Illustration resources →