Why you want to hire a real artist to do your illustrations

And I learned here that my cheap crayons are better than some of my oil pastels. 

Looking around the vast regions of ebooks being published, one cannot help noticing the artwork of the book covers being trotted out. In some case, the artwork is like "Wow--who is the artist? I so want them on my team." And in other cases, it is "God, I hope that you did the artwork yourself because you paid too much otherwise."

There are reasons to hire a real artist even if you can draw a straight line and/or modify photos in Photoshop. Just like there is a whole bunch of rough drafts and technical knowledge involved in being a writer (also applies to formatters, social media pros, and editors...perhaps even publishers), there is also a whole bunch of technical knowledge and puttering around involved with being an artist.

Just take for instance, the technical knowledge of various art materials. Oil pastels sound so much better than colored pencils, don't they?

But in practice, you could end up with a piece of bad art like the above development piece. It turns out that some oil pastels are worse than the cheapest box of crayons.

Oh, maybe you say it is just a bad artist. Ok, the blue scary monster below is by the exact same artist using the exact same paper. The difference? Oh, he used colored pencils instead.

Of course, to figure out that colored pencils are a better option (at least, compared to this particular set of oil pastels), he had to spend some time doing a rough piece of artwork. This is why artists do not necessarily work at the speed that one thinks that they should.

And if you do not want to spend a lot of time developing your art talent and learning a lot of stuff about various art materials, yet want decent artwork, you are better off hiring a professional artist.

Same artist, same paper, different medium. 

The original pencil sketch (changed color filter for contrast).