In this video Ryan Maloney (RyRyArt) walks viewers through the entire creative pipeline for a children’s picture book, from concept to final product. He begins by reading excerpts from two of his own self‑published picture books—Pancake, Pennsylvania and The Day Gravity Goes Loco—to illustrate the kind of whimsical storytelling he aims for. He then provides a step‑by‑step tutorial on how to self‑publish a paperback on Amazon’s KDP platform, covering ISBN acquisition, sizing, interior and cover PDF preparation, and royalty basics. Next, he shares his creative process for generating story ideas, sketching, inking, and coloring using paper, an iPad Pro, and the Procreate app, emphasizing a rough‑first‑draft mindset and layer‑based coloring techniques. He demonstrates how to turn a simple illustration into an auto‑lip‑synced animated character using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Character Animator, detailing mouth‑shape layer naming, anchor points, and camera‑based facial tracking. Finally, he outlines the early stages of a Kickstarter campaign for his upcoming graphic‑novel project The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine, describing placeholder graphics, story development, reward tier brainstorming, and research of successful campaigns. Throughout, Ryan’s tone is informal, enthusiastic, and instructional, offering practical, low‑budget advice for aspiring creators.
Chapters
This is a picture book I wrote called Pancake, Pennsylvania from about 4 years ago. It's a paperback picture book that I use kdp.amazon.com to print on demand and ship. So people buy it on my website and then Amazon prints it and ships it, and I don't have to handle any of that stuff. I don't think I can read it in 30 seconds, but I'll read the first few pages. At the peak of the Poconos, there was a peculiar place called Pancake, Pennsylvania. And as you might ponder, the people of Pancake were wrapped in pancake mania. Pancakes were pecked on for breakfast bites, but what was preferred for dinner at night? Well, if you guessed it, then you picked right. People pigged out on pancakes at night. The people of Pancake played ping pong with paddles made with ping pong pancake handles. Pictures of pancakes were posted on Pinterest while pogo stick bouncers— I can't read it. All right. How to self-publish your own children's book. Go to kdp.amazon.com. This will connect to your Amazon account. You just create a new paperback book, give it a title, fill out all this information, choose get a free ISBN number to have that generated. You're going to copy and paste that into an ISBN number generator. You can just Google one, it's free, and it'll let you download the file. Once you get that barcode, you just put it on the back of your book Choose a book size. I like 8.25 by 8.25. Fill out all the information and upload an interior PDF and a cover PDF. Review it and you're good to go, and you get royalties for each book sold. This is a picture book called The Day Gravity Goes Loco that I wrote and illustrated, and I print on demand at kdp.amazon.com. Today I saw with my own two eyes a train off its tracks flying in the sky, a herd of cows jumping over trees, and a gigantic river flowing right above me. Of course I saw flying cats and dogs. I saw floating snakes, caterpillars, and frogs. Even the worms had learned to fly. Luckily so had my neighbor's pies. My friends rode bikes like they were airplanes. Construction workers took vacations because of upside-down cranes. The zoo? Well, forget it. It was just a mess. Have you ever seen a weightless lioness? The heaviest of things were as light as a feather. My bed, my toys, all flying together. Thank goodness for shoelaces because they held me down. It's the first night I've slept floating off the ground. There's a word in Spanish that means crazy. That word is loco, and it can happen to gravity. Gravity, you ask? It holds things down to the planet. It's like one big invisible super strong magnet. So imagine if for even one day gravity slowly faded away. Juice would magically rise from your c— There would be only one hairstyle standing straight up. I bet your house would even float into space. Take my advice, tie it down with a shoelace. And if you see me float by, say hello on the day gravity goes loca— If you want to self-publish your own children's picture book, here's a really simple way to think about it. Break it down into two parts: story and illustrations or art. Your story is up to you. You gotta write it, test it, push through to completion. Usually just writing it on paper, any notepad will do. Don't overthink the illustrations or think you have to spend a ton of money on them. You can make it sketchy, rough, you can do an amateur style, or you can hire a professional if you know one. But if you're not looking to break the bank, you don't even need illustrations. There are some books without them. You could just use words or typography, whatever you want. Then you need to create a cover and an interior file. Your cover will have a front and a back and possibly a binding, but for my paperbacks, I don't even use a binding. Aim to have 32 pages in your book plus a couple title pages, so that'd be 2, 4, 6, and so on. Then you just need to upload that cover PDF and interior file to a print-on-demand service. I use kdp.amazon.com. I have no affiliation. All right, so I decided instead of self-publishing this the old-fashioned way, I am gonna do A Kickstarter. I've never done this before. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm starting to set up my images. The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine. Here's my header image. In the works. I know that was kind of boring. Here's how to start writing and drawing a kids' book. First you need an idea. Let's back up for a second. Why do you want to make this book and who is it for? I'm making a book or music video or a video or design, anything creative, I always envision the person on the other end receiving that and the reaction on their face. That's my why. I love that moment that I can light somebody up. Who's your book for? Your target audience. Think about that. Kids, adults, is it a picture book? I make picture books, so that's what this video is about. All right, so back to your idea. You have an idea for a story and you have the idea for characters in that story. If you're like me, ideas start off as little seeds. I don't have the fully formed story in my head. It just starts off as a tiny little idea, and day by day As I write and I draw, the seed will grow. But these are days that I stack together, writing on paper, drawing on paper. Some days are writing, some days are drawing, and then I go back and forth. Some days I do both. As you go, you will hit what I call the point of disgust. Push past it. Let's draw a giant stack of monsters. First thing we're gonna do, put on our headphones. Then we're gonna start to sketch it, just rough sketching on a roll of paper and just pick out where the monsters go, stack them on top of each other, squish them, get some seltzer going. Keep this really rough because pretty soon we're going to import it into the Procreate app on the iPad Pro. Then we're going to ink it. I'm just using one of the regular brushes in Procreate to ink this. Thing. I like somewhat smooth lines, but if you zoomed in, you'd see they're not completely perfect. So don't feel like you have to be at the perfect lines. And that's it. We crushed a monster drawing. This is the work in progress of the big stack of monsters I'm currently coloring in. Got it all inked, starting to drop in their eye color, figuring out what color these characters are going to be. You can just drag and drop colors. When I color, I duplicate the ink layer and then add the color to the layer below it. That way, when I drag and drop colors or color in the layer below it, I can go in and clean up and make sure there's no space between the ink, and the color. How to animate a simple cartoon character and have it auto lip sync to save you time. First, you're going to create it, then you're going to set it up. You're going to need Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Character Animator. Then we're going to auto animate it with a camera. I should have drawn a little camera. Maybe I'll draw a little camera so you get the point. Is that a camera? Okay, that's a terrible camera. First, we're going to draw a baloney sandwich on rollerblades. Then we bring the character into Adobe Illustrator. Don't worry about these layers, we're just going to design the character first. So build out the character. I'm sorry, my desk is a mess. Build it with simple shapes. And now once it's done, we're gonna focus on building mouth shapes for each one of these layers. And make sure you keep the layers named exactly as they are in my file or one of the files that you download from Adobe Character Animator. Then get some seltzer going before part 2. This is part 2 of auto animating character. We are going to start building our mouth shapes in Adobe Illustrator. Build a mouth shape for each one of these layers and keep the naming of these layers exactly the same so when you import it into Adobe Character Animator, it's automatically recognized. So let's import our character. Now let's pause here because it's important to know that where you see "baloney" in that red dot, That's the character, but to create a scene, you need to follow the red dot down there. Create the scene, but then go into your character and set up some anchor points so your character doesn't move all around the screen and the legs stay anchored to the ground. Now set the camera pose to your face, and the camera reads your face. Now the camera reads my face. This is part 1 of setting up my Kickstarter campaign for The Night My Bed Turned into a Submarine graphic novel. I'm only on phase 1. I've got my initial placeholder graphic in place. I'm going to add some background graphics. I'm still working on the story, so I don't know what's going to go in the background here. Maybe an octopus or a pirate hook, maybe a lost city of gold that's underneath the lake, and definitely his submarine somewhere. So I've got all the basic information set up. With a description of the book. When Till's bed mysteriously transforms into a submarine, he's forced to go off on an adventure to find a sunken city of gold. Filled with gold. I've got to work on a video, figure out my funding goal. I'm going to do a 60-day campaign. I have not gotten that far into the pledge amounts. All I know is for $1 it'll be a digital PDF. I'm looking at other Kickstarter campaigns like Derek Laufman's Creations. Just to model my rewards after his. His project looks amazing, by the way. Oh, I need to create some of these fancy
