As I am going back to illsutration as a career path whilst I was researching the sector I found this competition for an unpublished childrens book. The deadline is the 24th of April – right around when Easter break ends. I think this will be a fun project to undertake over Easter.

https://www.panmacmillan.com/mac-prize-entry-page

Information from the website

Initial Idea –

I have never attempted to write a childrens book before so I began the ideation process by thinking of what I liked as a child and what would have appealed to me. This led me to an idea of a book revolving around a china doll or a book about a child that doesn’t like conventional toys

A little notebook I used to quickly jot down initial ideas and musings.

Primary Research

To better understand how I should present the book and the style of writing. So I went to Waterstones and looked at picture books currently on sale.

These two books I liked the most, their writing style is simple and the stories are small, focusing on only a couple characters.

I next revisited the project during Easter break I still liked the china doll idea but I did not have a clear story in mind.

I then decided to combine this project with Mermay an instagram challenge where you post a mermaid every day in May on my art instagram.

Once this occurred to me I had a lot more ideas and began making a mind map.

After the mind map I began planning the dialogue and book layout in a google document.

In this document I wrote down the dimension specifications, an outline of the story and the story as it will appear in the book. I also planned out what pages will be a double spread (meaning the picture will span across the two pages) or which one will be single. I also decided which pages I would fully create.

I then made thumbnails of the pages in a sketchbook, I will refer back to these when making the pages.

I drew the pages in Adobe Photoshop and added the words in InDesign from where I saved the PDF.

I began by working on the full colour pages as I knew these would take me the longest. Some natural changes came about while I was drawing such as making the skateboarding page a double spread so both characters could be on the page. I added these changes to the thumbnail plan.

This is the final book that I submitted to the competition. I am very proud of myself for finishing the project in under 2 weeks and submitting before the deadline closed. I also am very pleased with the result.