I found this project very difficult as I am the youngest in my family and do not have any interactions with children’s books at all anymore. I struggled to come up with an idea for the story and then afterwards to come up with the illustrations, I changed ideas quite a few times. To start with, I think that I could have researched further into children’s books just by finding some and reading them, as I don’t really remember lots from my childhood and I only read a couple in the workshops. I think by doing this I could have gained a better knowledge of what elements make up a good children’s book and therefore could have made mine better.
Overall, I think that I made a good attempt at the book. I think that the story idea was a good one as teaching children about death, loss, grief and the emotions that come with it is something that is very difficult to explain. However, in terms of the wording of the story, I think that I could have put a little more thought into it and perhaps written a proper story before I began illustrating it. I found it much easier to have a rough storyline in my head and draw a storyboard and go from there with my illustrations than write the story beforehand, however I would have benefited from writing it before in my opinion as I found it very difficult to write the words according to the pictures and make it fit. When I came to writing the actual story I found that I developed the story further and wanted to add more illustrations in but I did not have time as I left this to last.
In terms of my illustrations, I think that they work quite well but they look a little plain on the white background, the space looks quite empty. When I had planned my illustrations, I wanted to have a white background with just the drawings on but when I came to putting it altogether it did not work quite the way I wanted it to. I think that if I had drawn a background into the picture with the character but then cut around it in a circle and faded it out into the white background it would have worked better. Additionally, where I have coloured parts of the background, for example the floor in the angry illustration and in the isolation one, I did this very lightly as I did not want too much colour to show. However, when it came to scanning it in, where I didn’t use the greatest quality paper, which I regret, you can see through it so it doesn’t look as nice. I think that if I had used better paper, and fully committed to colouring the ground it would have looked better. There a couple of my illustrations that I particularly like, for example the happy one at the end and the crying rabbit that I used on the front cover. I think that these illustrations work really well and look like something that you would actually see in a children’s book.
