For both adults and kids, storybooks are a fairyland where we can get rid of the bothering in real life and indulge in the magic world. While the words themselves are blessed with magic, it is the stunning illustrations that truly unlock their full potential.

Crafting beautiful illustrations for storybooks can be both time-consuming and challenging. Luckily, with the help of AI book illustration generator, we can simply describe the scene in a story in text and click the “generate” button. Bam! Lots of beautiful illustrations are created in seconds. Therefore, why not take advantage of AI to breathe life into your stories? AI-generated art is not only an incredibly convenient way to realize our creative visions, but it is also a fascinating and enjoyable form of artistic expression.

In this blog, we will delve into the introduction of a great storybook illustration and guide you through some powerful AI book illustration generators including Leonardo. AI, Comic Factory and Ideogram AI to create stunning storybook illustrations.

Not just AI-generated book illustrations, text-to-diagram process can also be boosted by AI tools like PicDoc. There is no need to create a diagram manually through troublesome steps. With the help of Picdoc, you can generate a diagram with just a click as the following picutre shows:

Click here to give it a shot if you are interested.

What makes a good illustration in a book?

Before diving into generating amazing storybook illustrations, let's first define what a storybook illustration is and what makes a good illustration.

For centuries, storybook illustration has been a captivating art form that continues to enchant readers of all ages. By creating a visual world, illustrations bring stories to life and allow readers to fully immerse themselves in the narrative. This art form is particularly crucial in children's literature, as it engages young readers and makes stories more vivid. Images can clarify complex ideas and visualize emotions, making it easier for children to comprehend and connect with the story. Additionally, illustrations serve as visual clues, helping children remember story details and characters.

For adults, illustrations can also enhance the reading experience. Many adult books, such as graphic novels, use illustrations to add visual appeal and deepen the reader's understanding of the story.

Generally, great illustrations are characterized by visual appealing, clarity, innovation and age appropriateness in a book.

The most common book illustration style

Now that we have understood what makes good illustrations, let's take a look at some common illustration styles and the scenarios in which they are used. Choosing the right illustration style in line with the story when creating illustrations is quite important as it can convey the proper message and quickly engage the readers.

• Realistic Style: The realistic style is highly detailed and lifelike, often using precise lines and shading to create a sense of depth and realism. It’s often used in educational materials like textbooks, especially in subjects like biology or geography, where accuracy is crucial.

• Cartoon Style: These illustrations are usually featured by exaggerated features and full of energy, capturing children’s attention within a few seconds. Often, characters are depicted with oversized features—like large, expressive eyes and dramatic facial expressions.

• Minimalist Illustrations: Minimalist illustrations use minimal lines and colors, focusing on simplicity and clean design. It’s often used in logos and marketing materials where a clean, modern look is desired.

• Black-and-white Illustrations: Black-and-white illustrations are enduring, imparting a sense of timelessness and vintage charm to a story. Utilizing shades of gray, shadows, and stark contrasts, they create atmosphere and depth, making them ideal for conveying serious or mature themes.

• Watercolor Illustrations: These illustrations radiate a soft, welcoming glow that adds a touch of subtle sophistication to children’s books. The smooth merging of colors makes it a top pick for stories inspired by nature or those with a soothing theme. It’s the ideal style for bedtime stories.

Generate and edit book illustrations using AI

Once you have gathered inspiration and systematically organized and tracked all of your ideas, the next step is to input them into an AI-art generators which have revolutionized the creative process by making it accessible to everyone, regardless of their level of expertise. These tools empowers users to create illustrations instantly, democratizing the world of art and design. Next, I’ll guide you through 3 most useful AI illustration design tools one by one.

Leonardo AI

Leonardo AI is a powerful AI design tool that can help you transform the text content in your book to engaging illustrations. Here are two key functions:

• Select Customized Style: Leonardo AI allows you to select and customize styles for your generated images. You can choose from a variety of pre-trained models that cater to your desired styles, such as photorealism, vintage photography, and digital art.

• Mimic Community Sharings: Leonardo AI fosters a collaborative community where users can share their creations and draw inspiration from others. You can view and interact with a feed of images generated by other users. What’s more, you can access and modify the prompts used by others to generate specific images. You can mimic style you see in the community feed by using the remix function and implanting your prompt replacing the main character portions.

Comic Factory

If you are willing to jam with AI and treat it as collaborator, Comic Factory is definitely a cool tool for you to create amazing comics and illustrations. Comic Factory is available on hugging face and it’s totally free to use！

What really attracts me is its large number of classic styles. The AI generator consists of plenty of different styles including Japanese, Franco-Belgian, American modern, American 1950s Flying Saucer, humanoid, haddock and Amoricon. Japanese model has a relatively old-school Manga style. Franco Belgian is very much in the style of Metal Hurlant or heavy metal. The American modern style has a very Marvel DC kind of superhero vibe. These numerous classic styles can offer you great flexibility to create illustrations reflecting certain era based on the time and background in your story.

As the project is pretty new, so you need to be mindful of some unexpected bugs but Julian said he would continue refining and releasing new models of Comic Factory.

Openart AI

Openart AI is the last AI design tool that I highly recommend. You can create captivating illustrations for any book genre. Just input your text, customize settings, and generate unlimited images for free or with credits.

The most powerful function of Openart is definitely “Chat to Edit”. For most people who are just laymen in design, editing the images manually can be a great headache if you are not satisfied by what is generated by AI. Editing in Canva or Photoshop is quite time-consuming and complicated. Luckily, “Chat to Edit” in Openart can save you from trouble. All you need to do is just uploading the image you want to edit and giving clear request to AI. Then Openart will edit the image automatically and generate a new image you want in seconds.

For example, I wanted to change the text in the following picture from”turn text to chart with AI”to "turn text into images with AI”, so I uploaded the original picture and input the prompt telling Openart my edit request. To my surprise, it successfully changed the words on the picture in the right way and gave back what I want. Just as the following pictures show:

Conclusion

In this blog, we have talked about what makes good illustrations and share powerful AI tools like Leonardo AI, Comic Factory and Openart AI. Keep in mind that it's essential to select an AI art generator that aligns with the aesthetic of your storybook, personalize your illustration to make it unique, and save and export it in the file format that suits your needs. Hope you find this post helpful and click here to give PicDoc a shot.