So this is some very different work to my usual but I thought you may like to see it anyway. This book is a personal project of mine that I completed during 2017. It is particularly special to me for a number of reasons:
1. It was my husband's idea to make this book for our niece. Tamman (my hubby) even wrote it!! And what is more endearing than a man (who has barely cared to even read a book in his life) taking the time to write a cute, rhyming little story about and for his little baby niece?
2. It was fantastic getting to illustrate things from my imagination! I love the challenges of painting in my usual realistic style but creativity can be SO much more free and enjoyable with the pressure of perfection taken off! I could let mistakes happen and not even care! I could go outside of the lines and let it become part of the whimsy of the drawing! I could draw a moustache on the Teddy bear if I felt like it! (Which I did.)
3. It was a lot of work to complete this book and I'm proud of the end result. For the record, Tamman wrote the story (which I think is adorable) but I edited it, typed it up, designed and completed the illustrations, scanned and edited them, and had to figure out how to assemble all the text and images so that I could have them printed in a hardcover book through Officeworks photobooks!*
The only issue with having created this book is that we have gained two nephews and a daughter since we made Mayah's book, and in the interest of keeping things fair...we now have an increasing number of personalised children's book to create! We have already created one nephew's book but you'll have to check back here to see how that one turned out.
Here are a few of my favourite illustrations from Mayah's book. If you would like to see and read the entire story I plan on posting it in it's entirety on my facebook page within the next day or so. I hope you like it!
*Officeworks is not designed for creating illustrated children's books but for our purposes it did the job reasonably well. The colours are not perfectly matched and a little higher in contrast but I guess only I would know that if I hadn't just told you so...