To make your own picture book, there's no need for big publishing names and fancy titles. Just you and your creativity.
First and foremost, you're going to need some kind of story, next you need your pictures.
Now, as this is YOUR picture book, there's no need to be elegant with sophisticated drawings. Just make it what you want it to be, and what I think would be a real treat is to get your kids to fill the book with their own artwork and designs, so that maybe twenty years from now they can look back at what they've done.
Children's picture for the story "Fred the Elephant"
Once you've got your pictures and your stories sorted out you can figure out your next step. That is, to get everything into the computer and into a book format. Firstly scan in your pictures (or if you don't have a scanner, take a photo and upload it to your computer) once you have all the files in one easy access place, you can move on to the next step.
That next step is finding an online photobook creator, now you can find many of these, but many of them are solely for photos, there's no creativity, nothing you get to modify yourself, just books filled with photos. Which is fine if that's what you want, but a quick and simple place to go is to Officeworks, yes, Officeworks.
At the Officeworks
website you can find a selection of different sizes and types of books. All you need to do is download their software onto your computer and then create a new file (you can pick the size of book, how many pages, whether it is hard or soft back, and what type of cover you want). Using the online downloadable program (found
here) it is quick and easy to create your own books - simply place your pictures and text.
The whole process is quick and simple and then you can automatically process the creation and delivery of your very own picture book.
A cover of an Officeworks made picture book
The books are lots of fun to have, and it is incredibly entertaining and fulfilling for children to have their bedtime story book be a book of their own creating. The only word of warning is that you must have high quality pictures, and the spacing of the pictures/pages must be done carefully so that nothing gets cut off (although usually the Officeworks team will notify you if something seems off once you've submitted your designs).
It really is a lot of fun to make and to read afterwards, and you have an everlasting memory and copy of your hard work.