To My Child, You Are Loved
'A love letter to my child, your child, every child, and the grown-up inner child too. An ode to a parent's love, self-love, self-belief, and confidence in one's self'
Claire Smith (C.M.P Smith), approached me to work with her to bring her beautiful poem about unconditional parental love to life in the form of a fully illustrated children's book including the front and back covers.
This was a collaborative and creative project. Claire and I worked closely together to bring her words to life with beautiful illustrations. She required the illustrations to be colourful, unique and for the viewer to be able to understand the story intuitively by looking at the art. Claire also required me to help her design the graphic layout of all of the text so that it flowed and integrated with the images, to select appropriate fonts and prepare the book in Adobe inDesign for publishing.
Watch This Short Video About the Project
When working with clients I split the process into 3-4 stages: Concept Design, Concept Refinement & Colour Concepts, Final Artwork Rendering and Formatting for Publishing.
Below are some of the sketches I created during Stage 1 - Concept Design.
After brainstorming and collaborating with the client, creating mood boards and 1-3 loose sketch concepts of each desired illustration, including possible sketched layouts for text to flow in the images.
After receiving the client's feedback on the concepts, we decided on which concepts should be futher developed into stage 2.
In Stage 2: Concept Refinement, I developed the selected concepts, making changes where clients have requested amendments. In this stage, I will draw out the ideas with detailed line to define them more and will then create 1-3 thumbnail colour pallet experimentations. This stage will also include graphical layout design and font selection if required
Below are come examples of the refined linework and colour experimentations from this stage.
After selecting the chosen colour pallets and receiving feedback once again from CMP Smith, I moved onto Stage 3 of this creative process - Final Artwork Rendering. By this stage the client had a clear vision of the final artworks and colour pallets. I applied the final minor amendment requests and then proceed to render the final high-fidelity coloured artworks in the agreed style.
Once completing the final artworks and finalising the font selections, I then moved onto designing the Front and back covers, and formatting the documents for publishing (Stage 4) - In this stage, I research a variety of fonts that could be used for the book, I will also design the layouts and prepare the book documents as per the publishing specifications.
The Client required help preparing the book in softback, hardback and eBook format via 3 different publishers - IngramSpark, Amazon and Maxims. I learned about the specifications for each of these publishers and formats and created the appropriate files in Adobe inDesign. We also created a colouring book using the refined line artworks from stage 2. This provided the client with extra marketing materials for her launch and promotions.
Below are some of the final rendered pages from the book.
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The Client was very happy with the outcome of this project. Throughout the process, we iterated the artworks as much as needed to ensure that the final artwork resonated with Claire's vision. The final book was a 32-page spread of full bleed illustrations.
Client Testimonial
"I have worked on a children's picture book with Olivia from idea to publishing. She has done the illustration, cover design and book design. Her graphic design background is a real asset to her as a children's book illustrator and book designer. Right from pitching for the work she stood out with her proposal. Olivia was a joy to work and collaborate with, she encouraged me to follow my gut feeling and excelled in accepting feedback on her illustrations and ideas.
Olivia was great at communicating, particularly if a self imposed deadline wasn't going to be met. Olivia has been very quick to respond to communications throughout the work. Excellent collaboration; during the illustration process we came up with ideas together, Olivia bought her own ideas and also developed mine.
She was exceptional at taking feedback throughout the project and when I felt a concept wasn't working out needed amending she didn't take it personally and was very professional throughout. Her illustrations have elevated my words and the final output is truly something special. I would highly recommend her."