Asklemmy

I think that might be a good thing to do if you can; there are probably others in your situation who would love to have a book like this.

You could even do something like donate proceeds to a kidney charity or hospital.

I'm an even more unlikely thing! I wasn't born with any Vietnamese heritage -- I immigrated to Vietnam and integrated. I've met as many as five others like me in the last decade or so!

The RMIT forum isn't specific to art, it's just a job forum where you can post jobs available to students:

https://rmitvn.careercentre.me/employer/default/RMIT-Careers-Portal

I've used it once to hire a software developer. It was much better than VietnamWorks, the big online HR thing in those days. I don't like VW much.

BTW you should have a budget, scope, and timeline when you post a job. It will make it much easier to hire someone, e.g. how many illustrations, what format (Width x Height), what style, when do you need it done by, and a pay range. I would estimate at less than 80$ or so, it would not be worth the trouble for most illustrators who are any good. Notably, most RMIT students are from wealthy families.

If you can read/write Vietnamese, let me know and I can maybe point you toward better resources. English-language-only leaves few options here.

not the OP you replied to, but someone else who loves the Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain book.

I think 5 days is ambitious. but a lot of what the exercises are doing is training you to see a different way. so it's not impossible.

someone neurodivergent may struggle to get what the exercises are trying to teach or to reach the point they're aiming for, so it might take them longer. those more inclined to pick it up faster probably aren't going to need the exercises in the book; it's already natural to them.

as we grow up, we learn "this is what a tree looks like, this is a dog looks like, this is what a car looks like", etc etc. the way we see a new car then goes through that filter of "this is what a car looks like". those filters are great for quickly identifying things and generally being a human in the world, so you don't get hit by a car while you're still figuring out if it is a car.

but those filters get in the way of drawing accurately. your eyes aren't literally filtering anything; that's all in your brain. so you need to learn to stop that part of your brain when you draw. that's the biggest part of being able to draw decently. the rest is technical skill you get with practice.

I'd still recommend the original OP look for an artist collaborator, since children's books need the illustrations to be as strong as the writing. there's no way to get there in just 5 days.

One possible interpretation is that autistic individuals can sometimes tend to go a bit overboard when finding a new hobby. We will sometimes find a new topic so engaging that we develop a "special interest" in it and spend days/weeks delving into every possible piece of information and niche knowledge available about that topic, considering all the implications and what-ifs and following all the informational leads.

Spending merely the minimum time required (which in this example is apparently 5 days) to get proficient is harder to estimate because an autist may instead need to spend weeks learning everything. Or, they might not.

Before cheap, ubiquitous photographic reproduction, drawing was taught to people as a skill.

You might not be the next Gary Larsen (I'm no dillitente) but I bet if you tried you could become a good illustrator.

Having said that, you still have to learn inking, coloring, etc.

Just wanted to say I think most people can learn the skill in the same way most people can learn to write a rhetorical essay or do arithmetic.

Edit: not trivializing your issues, friend, just offering encouragment!

Fair enough. I'm pretty sure most of the fuss around AI is way over exaggerated. But we'd need a few more legal disputes and a few new laws to ultimately settle this.

I'm alright with using AI tools. I think it's wrong that these companies just take everything they can get hold of, without licensing it. (I mean, I would get in trouble if I downloaded illegal torrents of every novel out there without paying the authors. But it seems companies that develop ChatGPT get away with similar things.) But in the end it's like if a teacher copies textbooks or shows a pirated version of a movie. This doesn't make the things the students learned from it 'illegal' or forbidden knowledge. I think the same applies to AI. (Given the fact they don't copy this 1:1 which they usually don't do anyways... It is possible AI regurgitates its training data in some special cases. So there is some substance to this worry. But I've mainly seen this issue come up for example when generating computer code. Less so with images.) But that's just my oppinion.

It could bite into your side of copyright, however. But then you're also embedding that into a context, adding your own text and story around it. Even if the single images turn out not to be copyright-able, the combined work definitely is.

I don't want to talk you into using AI. Just: before you end up not doing it at all, maybe re-consider using it. Or do it as a preliminary step to draft something you like. You can still send this version to an artist afterwards.

And I bet all those issues will be solved in a few years time. Everyone and their grandma are already using AI and AI is not going away. There is no way around that.

This being said, I think AI also has downsides. Sometimes I generate images or text. But I don't think it's proper art. It copies styles well and does what it's told to do. Sometimes it is super creative and does hilarious things, sometimes the output is a bit bland. But it can't choose a style for a reason, or embed things into a context or hide little things or a second level of meaning into it's output. It doesn't choose colors or other details to underline a certain thing as a proper human artist would do.

And using AI for real-world purposes is hard. Like you have to learn how to force it to draw the same character in the next image and not a completely different woman. Add the details that fit. Do a consistent stlye. And as I understand people work on their prompts for quite some time before they get the exact results they want. And still, they then generate hundreds of images and go through them to end up with a single good one. It's way harder to put it to good use, than drawing some astronaut on a horse for some quick fun.