Turning an AI Picture-Book Prototype into a Consistent Illustrated Children's Book

Fien De Waele Tongeren, Belgium · 1H AGO

I wanted to turn two characters I had already developed, Fant the elephant and Viper the nurse snake, into a children's book about illness, sadness, and friendship. I had story ideas and character art, and I wanted to know whether AI could help me build a real book without losing their identity. This workflow is for anyone who wants to use an AI book generator as a storyboard and voice test, then develop the final art separately. 1. I used my conversation-archive plugin, Archiefvis, to revisit character and series concepts from a year ago. That context helped us choose Fant's fear that his friends only like him when he's entertaining. 2. I ran Kids Book Maker with my original drawings and a page-by-page brief. It produced nine illustrated screens, including the cover, plus Dutch narration and dialogue I liked. The pacing and compositions were useful, but the art drifted toward soft pastel baby-animal illustrations instead of our bold retro cartoons. 3. I kept the page order, camera angles, warm settings, and some dialogue, which I also edited. My original artwork became the character and style reference, and the generator's pages served only as composition references. 4. I rebuilt one illustration at a time and approved useful versions as I went. Fant needed wide-open, expressive eyes because he was performing exaggerated cheerfulness. We corrected his gray skin tone and removed an unwanted tattoo. This is the prompt I adapted for those edits: «Keep the scene composition, camera angle, props, and atmosphere from image A. Redraw the characters to match the approved designs in image B: fixed proportions, expressive faces, bold dark outlines, saturated warm colors, and subtle retro-print texture. Preserve approved elements; change only [specific detail]. Add no unrequested lettering, tattoos, or limbs.» ! An extra elephant leg kept surviving my edits. Precise erasures may need a local masked edit rather than another full regeneration. 6. I made a clean, text-free cover illustration (rthag was No good) , so used an old Version and then added the title over the messed up text in Canva, because AI-generated lettering looked generic and then overly glossy. The result is several approved scenes, a much clearer visual style, and a story that holds together. The full print-ready book was finished by hand in Canva.