3 World Building Tips from a Top Art Director

Portfolio Review with Mallory Grigg

Hi everyone!

I am so excited to share some insight with you from Mallory Grigg, a Senior Art Director at Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group. She is an award winning art director and has worked on books across the children’s market. She generously offers portfolio reviews for illustrators. I paid for a 30 minute review, and not only was she so delightful to talk to, but she gave me some really strong, specific advice for advancing my art. I’d like to share some of that gold with you.

I told her that my current goal is to get an art agent. After looking at my online portfolio, she picked out two areas of growth:

• Varying facial features, specifically eyebrows and mouths ( I wrote about that in last week’s Children’s Book Study)

• World Building (which we’ll talk about today)

She noted that most of my portfolio is composed of spot illustrations or character pages. If I want get kids books, I need more environments. She’s absolutely right. Here are some environments she liked for specific reasons (maybe you have pieces like these already, or you can create your next piece with these as inspiration)

She liked that this one has dark night sky but the scene remains bright: