Illustrations for a children's book kickstarter campaign
Vroom is a passion project to get a children’s book self published, Luke originally wrote the story when he was 13 as part of a school project. He attended a local primary school to teach the children about literacy and while they he wrote a story from one of the children who loved cars. Luke wanted to revisit this story and turn it into a children’s book, donating a portion of the profits to a children’s reading charity.
The customer
Luke Peers
Illustration
Graphic Design
Print Design
The brief
The first step on this extremely noble quest was to create some illustrations and artwork for some sample pages and start a kickstarter campaign we we could raise funds to be able to finish the rest of the book and get it printed. Luke had some sketches courtesy of his 13 year old self that he drew for the original story and a lot of ideas for how he would like to update for the new version.
The process
The fire was lit for this idea when Luke came across his old version of the Vroom story. And being the lovely person he is the idea was born to turn it into something that could give back to children's reading in some way.
Luke shared the original story with me and we had a chat over the phone to decide firstly how many pages we should work on and secondly which ones it should be. We wanted to give enough insight into the story and give some life to Vroom so we decided to go with the front cover that would feature a big character design to bring Vroom to life and an internal double page spread that would give a window into the story itself.
I read through the story and started sketching some ideas for the various different pages along with potential page layouts, even though at this point we were only creating a couple pieces of final artwork it really helped me to start getting a feel for how the whole book would be laid out so I could understand how the pages would flow together and how the illustrations would sit on the page.
I sent these initial sketches over to Luke and we decided to go with the direction of full bleed illustrations, that in the case of the double page spread would sit over a page and a half.
Once we had the sketching phase nailed I made a coffee and got to work on the illustrations themselves, working from the initial sketches on my iPad to creating their digital counter parts. I shared these with Luke each step of the way to ensure he was happy with how they we’re taking shape. After a few versions of typography on the front cover I decided to go with a hand drawn font as it felt more impactful with the full bleed illustration.
Digital illustrations done and signed-off and I could get onto the graphics work of laying out the double page spread, we had pre-agreed in a sketch how this was going to look so this was a case of picking a suitable typeface and we were all done, let the kickstarter campaign commence.
The Result
Breathing life into a character like Vroom was an absolute pleasure and we ended up with a cheeky little car that was ready to go on the journey to become a race car! We’ve had great feedback about the sample pages so far so I have high hopes for the campaign and I’m looking forward to helping the rest of the book get read for print.
Andrew Cox Design Company