Animation and Children's Book

http://www.gcastellano.com/arttips/2015/2/2/animation-and-childrens-books

Animators make great children’s book illustrators.
Why shouldn’t they? They can draw. They can paint. They understand character development and consistency. They know how to show form through gesture. They employ color theory to convey emotion. They’ve studied the great image-makers of the past—and not just from animation, but Impressionist, Renaissance, Post-modern, Ashcan, Baroque, Victorian, and Surrealist artists as well. They’ve gone to the zoo to draw real animals—and not just researched them online (if at all).
Animators are versatile, knowledgable, and dedicated. They understand production schedules and collaboration. And they’re fast. Boy, do I love how fast they are. This is a true conversation at a recent meeting at Penguin:
Managing Editor: Will the art be in on time?
Art Director (Me): Yes, he’s worked in animation.
Managing Editor: Oh! So he’s fast. Ok, we’re fine.
In this post, I will aim to shed a little light on being an animator in the children’s book world. I don’t know everything there is to know about the subject. I can only speak to my experiences as an art director who hires animators and character designers—and why I love working with them. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to use the term “animators” to include anyone working in the animation industry: character designers, visual developers, storyboard artists, etc.
ANIMATE. ILLUSTRATE. (MEDIATE. ALLEVIATE. TRY NOT TO HATE . . .)*
In 2009, when I was at Simon and Schuster, we partnered with Sony to publish books based on the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs movie. We decided to illustrate them—instead of using screen grabs from the movie. We hired Brigette Barrager and Pete Oswald—both were working in animation. Even though they were new to children’s books, they worked as if they had been in the book industry for years. The books looked great; and our colleagues in the licensing division of Sony were pleased.
The following year, we partnered with Dreamworks to publish Puss-in-Boots books. Brigette was hired again, and I found and hired Ovi Nedelcu. He had been working at Laika, and had never illustrated a picture book. I’ve been in publishing since 1999, and in all that time, I still think Ovi’s work is some of the best I’ve ever seen. It was clearly better than half of the work at that year’s original art show at the Society of Illustrators. Unfortunately, since Puss-In-Boots: The Cat, The Boots, The Legend, was a media tie-in book, his art did not qualify for the show. Pete (who now has an agent), Brigette (who now has an agent), and Ovi (who now has an agent) have since moved on from media tie-in to do original content picture books.

I read this amazing amazing article on animators and children's books.  This is just a small extract. This is something that I have always fancied doing, so I was thinking it might be a possibility (depending on time of course) to have the Dragon story made into a children's book we could sell along with the animation as limited edition with them. This is just an idea it would need a lot of research. But it makes perfect sense that the two fall hand in hand perfectly together. I think I've always had this romanticism about being a children's book writer as an old woman living in a pokey little cottage, that's why I think this article spoke to me so much. There's just so much in that future out there so much to do.