Parents and grandparents who make up stories for their children and grandchildren often think: "I would love to turn this into an illustrated book."
And then they check into costs and learn that illustrating a 32-page book by a top-notch artist can run up to $20,000 -- and that doesn't include printing.
If you have that kind of money, or if you think your book has commercial potential, by all means hire an illustrator. But now there is another way for hobbyists: Artificial-intelligence programs, among them Adobe's Firefly, Neolemon, OpenArt and ChatGPT, that are all capable of creating first-rate, suitable-for-printing images.
I know firsthand that illustrators are expensive, because two years ago I paid an artist $3,600 to draw a dozen illustrations for a self-published children's Christmas book inspired by, and featuring likenesses of, my first two grandchildren. For my next children's book, a surprise birthday present for my third grandchild, Sawyer, I decided to test AI instead.
Sawyer turns one in December, so anything I produced would have to be colorful, bright and short to keep his attention. And it would be full of illustrations that looked like him and his parents.
I came up with a fantastical story involving a loon and a lone boy, and gave it the title "Little Sawyer's Giant Adventures," with this beginning:
Sawyer would come each year with his parents to his grandparents' cabin on a pond in Maine.
He was little, but he dreamed big.
He dreamed of a giant moose named Marvin.
He dreamed of a giant beaver named Bucky.
He dreamed of a giant loon named Louie.
The program I used, Firefly, is included in my $70-a-month Adobe software subscription. For that, I get 6,000 credits a month toward creating high-resolution illustrations, at 300 credits per image.
Like Adobe, most of these programs let you experiment with creating lo-res images free, but you'll need a subscription to do the kind of heavy lifting involved in my project, generating 23 hi-resolution illustrations. For ordinary consumers, subscriptions run from as little as $10 a month to the $70 a month I pay. If you run out of credits, providers are thrilled to sell you more.
Firefly and other AI models operate on plain word prompts typed into a dialogue box. You also must choose the size of the illustration and its resolution -- in other words, how crisp and detailed it looks. I burned up 3,600 credits -- and had to start over -- before I settled on the specs that worked best. So, that is lesson No. 1: Plan ahead.
To create the images, I uploaded pictures of that I wanted Firefly to use as references for the illustrations: one of our log cabin; a headshot of Sawyer; and a picture of his parents. Firefly -- well, most of the time -- will put those reference pictures in the image at the place of your choosing and dress them to your liking.
I instructed Firefly to give me an image for an "illustrated children's book" using the cabin and the pond as the backdrops. Further, I typed, "Have the boy standing on the pond bank while his parents are watching from the cabin porch. Dress them all in summery hiking clothes." Firefly blew me away on two tries by coming up with this:
It was the look, feel and personalization I wanted. Of course, it wasn't literal (or perfect). Firefly aged Sawyer into a toddler. The pond could be mistaken for a river. And, in the picture, his parents are the same height when, in fact, his mom is taller -- something quite clear in the reference image I'd sent. I asked Firefly to fix it, but on three tries the image came back unchanged. Nine hundred credits wasted; cue the annoyance.
Telling Firefly to keep the style it had created, I asked it to put the boy in successive scenes in which he is dreaming of a giant moose, then a giant beaver, then a giant loon. They came back as instructed, but with no variation: Sawyer is in the same sleeping position in the same room, decor unchanged, in each frame.
I had also erred. There was nothing in the dream bubbles to show that the critters were giants. Since Louie the Loon was the vehicle for Sawyer's adventure, I asked Firefly to keep the image it had produced but put the loon next to a tiny red speedboat for perspective. And, oh, add a stuffed giraffe and loon to Sawyer's bedside to add variety to the decor. Bingo: It produced this image:
I then had Firefly remake the giant moose and giant beaver images similarly. Lesson No. 2: Be specific in what you want. (And now you can see how easy it is to burn through credits.)
After dreaming of Louie, Sawyer is out paddling with his parents in a kayak when they see an ordinary-looking loon. Sawyer knows it is the Louie of his dreams and tells his parents so as he waves to the loon and calls out his name. And, of course, the loon is Louie, who is lonesome and has a secret: At night, he becomes a giant who avoids other loons because he fears they will be jealous of his transformation. He's glad Sawyer waved to him and shows up at the cabin dock that night for a visit.
Using the dream scene above as the reference image, I asked Firefly to create an image of Sawyer coming out to meet Louie on the dock. The first try was good -- except that Sawyer comes out wearing a life vest. I asked Firefly to keep the image but delete the life jacket. Perfect:
Sawyer convinces the loon to take him on a flying journey. I asked Firefly to show Louie offering Sawyer -- wearing a "flying hat" and a life vest for good measure -- his wing. My prompt was long and complicated, but Firefly delivered:
At my prompting, Firefly then created a beautiful image of Sawyer and Louie taking off, which I placed on the page under large text reading: "A giant loon can go wherever it wants to go." That was a setup for a series of silly images in which they visit, among others, the Man in the Moon, and see "astronauts trying to eat spaghetti." I laughed out loud when Firefly produced this in about two minutes:
Firefly was also able to create an alluring cover and back cover -- something that saved me a few hundred dollars if I'd hired a professional (although I did have to purchase 2,000 extra credits for an additional $11.49 to complete that). The self-publishing site I used, BookBaby, charged $99 to print the 32-page book and ship me a proof copy.
The process requires patience and planning, and there is a learning curve that might be intimidating to the techno-challenged. And the glitches I described weren't the only ones. More than once, Firefly mysteriously injected text or captions into images. For a scene involving Sawyer in the kayak with his parents, Firefly put the kayak on the pond bank.
Still, all in all I was thrilled with the results -- and am on to my next project.
Write to reports@wsj.com. You can read a PDF of "Little Sawyer's Giant Adventures" with all of the illustrations on Ken Wells's website at bayoubro.com.
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