Making and redesigning children’s books
Book design
Since I was little, I have loved scribbling down my own cartoon story characters. I have been working on my own book illustrations for a children’s storybook I am writing for 5-7 year olds, The Oogly Octopus - a story about an octopus that is picked on by the others for being different, who teaches the others that difference is a good thing.
The red octopus below was my first character draft. I started with a character brief, a list of attributes I wanted to work from, then played around with brushes to create different colours and textures. I gave my little friend extra tentacles, a unibrow and one eye that is bigger than the other to make them look as unusual as possible. The character gradually evolved to look more simplistic until I wasleft with the octopus above which I felt was more friendly.
Above, two children’s book covers I have made. Left, a cover for my own original, unpublished story, The Oogly Octopus. Right, a redesign for E. B. White’s classic tale, Charlotte’s Web. I added Puffin logos to show how I would incorporate the branding into the layout.
For the cover redesign I did of Charlotte’s web, I wanted to create illustrations that were more playful and colourful than other existing colours to attract more modern young readers to this beautiful story. For the title I chose to use a font that was very angular so that I could incorporate it into the structure of Charlotte’s web more naturally. I wanted Charlotte’s web and Wilbur the pig to be in the central foreground of the artwork since they are key to the story. In the background I chose to interpret the rural Maine setting.
To begin with, I imported images of pigs and Maine, eventually creating ai vector art to inspire me at the side of the canvas as I worked. This helped me a lot when it came to visualising my ideas before I got them down on paper. I’ve included a screenshot of this stage of my process below…
