AI illustrations, cover, and back cover for a kids' book: a step-by-step guide

Part 3 of the Vivlore and the Lost Vikings series. By now you should have a storyline broken into individual pages, one line each, from Part 2. This part turns those lines into pictures, plus a front and back cover, using an AI image generator.

Illustration is where most first-time AI-assisted books fall apart, not because the individual pictures are bad, they're usually gorgeous, but because page four looks nothing like page five. A picture book has to feel like one world. Here's how to keep it that way.

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Lock a character and a style before you generate a single page

The single most important thing you can do, before generating any illustrations at all, is describe your main character and your art style in enough detail that you can paste the same description into every prompt.

For the Lost Vikings, the working description looked like this, kept in a notes file and reused for every single image:

"A small crew of five chubby-cheeked cartoon Viking children, round noses, oversized horned helmets, mismatched knitted jumpers under their armour, in a warm, hand-painted children's-book illustration style, soft watercolour textures, warm autumn palette of amber, rust, and forest green, thick friendly outlines, no photorealism."

Paste that exact block into every prompt, then add only what's different about that specific page, "the crew huddled under a longship turned on its side, sheltering from rain, looking worried but not scared." Most AI image tools will still drift a little from page to page, that's normal, but the shared description is what keeps the drift small enough to read as one book instead of twelve.

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Generate one page at a time, and be ruthless

Ask for a few variations of each page and pick the one that fits, don't just take the first result. Things to check on every image before you move on:

Does it match the line of text? An AI image generator will sometimes illustrate a detail you didn't ask for and miss the one you did. If the text says "lost in the fog" and the fog isn't there, regenerate.

Is it one clear scene? Every page in a picture book is one full-bleed image, not a busy collage. If a generated image is cluttered, ask for "a simpler composition, one clear focal point" and try again.

Does the character still look like the character? This is the one that breaks the most books. If your Viking crew has grown a sixth member, or their helmets changed colour, don't let it through. Regenerate with the locked description again, and if a tool keeps drifting, try feeding it your best previous image as a reference alongside the text prompt, most current AI image tools support this and it noticeably improves consistency.

Twelve to fourteen pages usually takes somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour once your character description is locked, most of that spent on the two or three pages that need several tries.

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The front cover

The front cover carries more weight than any single interior page, it's what everyone sees first, on the shelf and on screen. A few things that make an AI-generated cover work:

Feature the whole crew, not just one character, so the cover reads as an ensemble story, not a solo one.

Leave space for the title. Ask explicitly for "a wide, relatively uncluttered area in the upper third of the image for a book title to sit over," so you're not fighting a busy composition later when you add the title text in Vivlore.

Make it the most detailed, most ambitious image in the book. It's allowed to take more attempts than the interior pages. The Lost Vikings cover, all five of them squinting at a half-buried compass, took nine generations before one felt right, and it was worth every one of them.

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The back cover

Back covers are the most overlooked part of a self-made picture book, and the easiest to get right once you know what belongs there. A good back cover has three things: a small, calm image, usually one character rather than the whole crew, a short blurb, two or three sentences, written in the warm voice of a jacket description, and enough plain space for the printed price and barcode a print run needs.

A blurb prompt to Claude that works well:

"Write a two-sentence back-cover blurb for a children's picture book called Vivlore and the Lost Vikings, in the warm, slightly playful tone of a real picture book jacket. Don't summarise the ending."

For the image, ask for something quieter than the front cover, one Viking looking out at the horizon works better than the whole crew again. Two covers that are both busy and crowded compete with each other.

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Bring it all into Vivlore

With your pages, front cover, and back cover generated, you're ready to build. Start a kids' picture book if you haven't already, add your storyline from Part 2 one page at a time, and pair each line with its illustration. Vivlore's kids' template handles the square hardback layout, the one-picture-per-page rule, and the cover placement automatically, you're just filling in the pages you've already made.

When every page is in, you can read it together on screen straight away, or order it as a printed hardback from £34.99, a real square picture book with your AI-generated cover on the front and your child's actual voice somewhere inside it.

The Lost Vikings took an evening to write, an evening to illustrate, and about a week from first idea to a hardback on the shelf. That's the whole series: an idea, a few honest prompts, and a place to put what comes back.