Microsoft PowerPoint: Illustrate Children's Picture Books

Create and Publish a Children’s Picture Book Using Microsoft PowerPoint

You do not need expensive illustration software—or advanced drawing skills—to create an attractive children’s picture book.

In Microsoft PowerPoint: Illustrate Children’s Picture Books, you will learn how to use familiar PowerPoint tools to design complete picture-book pages, create original illustrations, add and format text, prepare your files for printing, and publish your finished book.

This practical course takes you through the entire process, beginning with the fundamentals of writing and publishing children’s books. You will consider your intended age group and reading level before learning how to prepare and publish children’s books.

You will then build the PowerPoint skills needed to create your book. You will learn how to navigate the PowerPoint workspace, create and manipulate page elements, define the correct page size, and configure PowerPoint to export high-resolution images at 300 DPI.

The course shows you how to create illustrations using several different approaches. You will learn how to find free artwork from Pixabay, use graphics from the Microsoft 365 resource library, import existing backgrounds, and create your own page backgrounds from scratch.

You will also discover how to:

• Arrange illustrations using layers and stacking order.

• Construct and recolor cartoon characters.

• Insert and format story text.

• Make text stand out against illustrated backgrounds.

• Download and use free fonts.

• Wrap text around objects.

• Apply creative text transformations.

• Combine backgrounds, characters, objects, and text into complete pages.

• Create a book cover, title page, and copyright page.

• Add headers and footers where appropriate.

• Export your finished book as JPEG images and a PDF.

• Prepare your book for self-publishing through Amazon KDP.

After completing the core picture-book creation process, you will move into more advanced PowerPoint illustration techniques.

You will learn how to draw almost any shape using PowerPoint’s freeform and curve tools. You will practice correcting freeform drawings, outlining reference images with vector shapes, applying solid fills and gradients, adding outlines, and grouping individual elements into complete illustrations.

Hands-on workshops guide you through the creation of a floral bouquet, a mushroom illustration, and the Busy Bee character. These projects demonstrate how simple PowerPoint shapes can be combined and customized to create detailed original artwork.

You will also learn how to copy text from Microsoft Word into your PowerPoint page layouts, helping you efficiently bring your manuscript and illustrations together.

Additional original course material provides further demonstrations, including the creation of Roscoe Goes Swimming, PowerPoint bootcamp lessons, and an introduction to using Google Slides as an alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint.

This course is designed for:

• Children’s book authors who want to illustrate their own stories.

• Self-publishers working with limited budgets.

• Beginners who do not consider themselves artists.

• Teachers and parents creating illustrated educational materials.

• PowerPoint users who want to explore its creative drawing tools.

• Aspiring illustrators looking for an accessible place to begin.

By the end of the course, you will understand how to plan, illustrate, format, export, and publish a complete children’s picture book using software you may already own.

Stop allowing the cost of professional illustration software—or the belief that you cannot draw—to prevent you from creating your book.

Enroll today and begin transforming your children’s story into a finished illustrated picture book with Microsoft PowerPoint.

I look forward to seeing you in the classroom!

—Brian