For this project I decided to try something for a children's book, titled "It's Okay to Be Afraid". The premise of the story is based around a young girl and her imaginary friend (ironically, a monster) spending a night during a storm trying to pass the time as the lights have gone out. The two characters go around the girl's house creating examples of various things that frighten the girl, fears quite common in a child's early life. The repeated quote "It's okay to be afraid..." tells the child that their fear is natural human behavior.
I based the concept from past (and current) experiences with my anxiety disorder, so the moral hits pretty close to home as it is a daily struggle to deal with, and it was especially struggling in my younger years when I was still trying to understand the world and those things that scared me so often (ie. Thunderstorms).
Below I have the process of how I rendered this concept:
To appeal to the more younger audience (preferably Toddler/Children ages) I decided to step out of what I normally do and use cut paper to make it simplistic and understandable without overcrowding with details, aside from the patterns and textures imported later on in the final.
For the curtains on the windows of both the cover and the page spread I used patterned cloth and binded them with wire tape and pressed them down with glue. All of the backgrounds were glued together with a glue stick and the characters were scanned in separately and imported at a later time.
For my first concept character renderings I tried a vector based/lasso tool with gradient style that was fully digital and overlayed with a paper texture. I wasn't content with this option, however, and decided to take it a step further when the cut paper idea came to mind.
What I wanted out of the characters was something a little more cartoony and colorful so it could cater to young children who more thoroughly enjoy cartoons.
I went ahead and gathered all of the colored paper I could find throughout the classroom and got to work cutting and gluing these characters together with an Xacto blade and then filled the eyes and mouth in with marker.
Once the characters were ready I scanned both into the computer and editted them with photoshop. I fixed some coloring and added shading overtop so the forms didn't appear so flat, and I overlayed a star texture I'd found to give the girl's blanket a little more visual interest aside from the plain blue that it was originally.
Final cover
Final cover spread
The final page spread is approximately 15.587in wide by 7.823in high.
For the final coloring and setup of the pages and cover I wanted the main color to be a purple/blue which is normally a calming color versus yellow or orange. The setting being at night the purple and blues were also appropriate, and to unite the characters into this I overlayed and shaded blue and purple tones into their images after putting them in.
Final page spread
