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.

After some feedback from my classmates, I was unsure whether to actually write the story in words in the book or just have illustrations, as they felt that the illustrations told the story fine. I did like this idea, but I was unsure when I finally came to putting the illustrations together. So I did two versions to then decide which one I liked better.

book wo words

final book3

Overall, I think that I preferred the version with words as it helps to tell the story more. I felt that without words the book was just a series of pictures the jumped around quite a lot. I felt that with words it made it much more clearer.

For the version with words, I chose the font DK Hobogoblin as I thought that this had a fun, child like style to it which is also clear enough for children to be able to read.

As suggested in my feedback on what I had done so far, I looked into how children react to grief and whether this is different from adults. I found that children don’t necessarily go through the five stages of grief, although they can display all the stages, and they can be seen as being happy and playing as though they have “gotten over it”. Below is a list of ‘normal’ emotional responses to grief from children.

1) Sadness

2) Anger

3) Irritableness

4) Guilt and self-reproach

5) Anxiety, insecurity and fear

6) Abandoned

7) Worried

8) Loneliness

9) Yearning

10) Helplessness and powerlessness

11) Shock

12) Numbness

13) Emancipation

14) Relief

15) Turmoil

Additionally there are physical responses although I will not use these in my book.

There are 6 thought patterns that can occur in children during grief. These are:

– denial

– confusion

– thoughts about the deceased

– sense of presence of the deceased

– difficulty concentrating

– nightmares

http://www.childgrief.org/howtohelp.htm