Luna's Learning ADventures
tldr;
🎨 I illustrated a children’s book!!
✨ Written by Mirianna Acevedo and inspired by her daughter, Luna’s Learning Adventures: The Fairy Garden is not just interactive, but a heartfelt invitation to unlock the wonders of reading with Luna and the fairies as your guide.
🧚♂️ As someone who has always loved fantasy, magic, and reading, it was an amazing experience to bring Luna's world to life. Although I’ve been illustrating for many years, it was a new challenge to complete a project of this size. I practiced skills including conveying complex ideas and emotions, creating a visual language and style, and drawing with specific users in mind.
💖 If you have or know someone with a little one learning to read, consider getting a copy of Luna's Learning Adventures: The Fairy Garden to help them with their reading journey!
Timeline: 2 months (April-May 2024)
Project type: Children's Book
Role: Illustrator, Creative director
Tools: Figma, Procreate, Canva
Team: Miri Acevedo (author, creative director)
Getting started
defining Overall layout & book flow
When I joined the project, the author had started to organize the written content onto pages, adding illustration ideas for many of the pages. With my input, we workshopped the page layouts and illustration direction until the book had a better flow and I could start drawing for each page.
low fidelity sketches
Time to start drawing! Low-fidelity sketches started to bring the book into view, and uncovered what else needed references. I left notes where I felt I needed more information, or for any questions I had. Using reference images and having conversations with the author allowed a clearer understanding and alignment to her vision.
While drawing, I continuously moved to a bird's eye overview and checked for flow issues, and found a few layout issues. Incorporating the "fail fast" mindset, we were able to find a much better flow for the pages.
defining style
whimsical
city-touch
cottage core
watercolor
magical
girly
Luna variations
Having multiple styles allowed the author and I to find the version that fit Luna best, as some were too young and others didn't quite fit the author's vision. This was also a chance to play around with different outfits.
drawing in detail
setting up the correct dimensions
Originally, the pages were set up as landscapes, but during the process we decided to switch to square, as it felt more like a children's book that way. With the new dimensions being 8.5in x 8.5in, I set the canvas size to 9in x 9in and set up bleed guidelines. However, since the illustrations started out as splash style, bleed wasn't as important but a good practice nevertheless.
lineart
luna in color
efficiency practice: color palettes
While sometimes working across several pages at once, using the color palette was a huge time saver. I had palettes for characters including Luna, her mom, the teacher, and the three fairies, and also for different backgrounds as well.
Progress pics!
splash vs Full page illustrations
If you order a copy of the book, you'll notice that most of the illustrations are full-page. It didn't initially start this way, with our choice to use splash illustrations due to time constraints.
However, as we started to place the illustrations into Canva to add the copy, the author thought we should have the background color of some of the pages be a fun color, not just white, as this would help to draw the eye.
Initially, we thought just expanding whatever color was used in the drawing would work, but as I kept drawing, it didn't work as it looked kind of drab, so I added more details or resized the image to fit (img 2)
As I resized images and expanded them, I realized that we needed to make sure the text could be read over the image. Image 3 was an example of this, as text couldn't be read over the bright bedspread.
Image 4 is the final version, where we'd also switched to a square composition.
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4