The Birthday Quest
The Birthday Quest is a personalized children's story created by Quest Stories a creative media studio. It's about a child that goes on a quest to find their lost birthday. Through their magical closet they enter a birthday themed world filled with surprises. Along the adventure the child makes friends with a colorful hungry bear, persuades a grumpy old owl, climbs up a talking tree’s trunk, and meets all sorts of strange, magical, creatures.
Written by Jessiac Ruiz
Art Direction and Illustration by Brian Lee
Book Trailer
Character Design
Children Designs
from early on in the project I wanted the audience to help create the visual look of the book that my team and i were creating. To do this I started sending variations of character designs out to social media platforms letting our audience vote on which they liked the best. As the votes came in I was able to zero in on what the final design would look like. I repeated this process for each new lead character.
After completing the first female character design it was time to create the additional 7 diverse characters. the idea is that each customer who orders the book is able to choose which character they want to play them in the story. they also enter their name and birthday whiich adds an extra level of personalization that is then incorporated in the story.
Here are some sneak peaks of the characters being applied to their environment and given gestures. each gesture had to be applied 8 times for each illustration.
Bear Designs
After the audience voted on their favorite illustration i combined the top 3 votes into one final design
Hand Drawn Lead Bear designs
Then began the turnaround, color, and gesture process
Digitally painted and rendered using photoshop
Facial expressions
One of the most important parts of the process when giving a page emotion.
The Talking Forest
In the story our character reaches the top of a mountain an meets these goofy long limbed creatures
Line work
added to environment
Meet The Owl
Although a little grumpy, the owl proves to be a good friend to have when lost in the middle of a enchanted forrest.
Again the initial sketches along the perimeter of the below image were sent out to social media groups and then, based on the votes, a final design was created and given multiple expressions.
Turnarounds and color Pass:
turn around and color pass
Added to environment and given a lighting pass
Supporting Creature Designs
Line work and color passes of multiple supporting characters from the story
Environments
Below are few examples of the envionments i created for "Lost my Birthday" (characters have been removed).
Kids room profile painting
midway up birthday cake mountain A.K.A stone peak mountain
sunset scene during the story
a view from the enchanted talking forest
A glimse at the world above the clouds
art for the cover. msterious jungle plants come to end where the mountain meets the sky.
a mysterious hole in the tree where the lead character meets several new friends
a glimpse at stone peak mountain, in the shape of a giant chocolate cake.
Bear lake, the pilot design for all others to follow. this painting set the tone for the rest of the book
an enchanted path leading out of the enchanted forest
The msterious enchanted forest, home to many glowing things and unusual creatures, through their magic closet this is where our character is introduced, for the very first time to the magical world of lost birthdays.
Interested in seeing all this put together as an epic adventure story for kids?
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