PROJECT: Illustrated Children's Book

I finished the writing component fairly quickly, but it took much longer to complete the illustrations and my drawing skills have grown a lot from these drawings. The book is called "Wattle Won't Waddle" and it's about a penguin who wants to run. It displays the frustration of not always getting your desires, and sometimes taking it a little slow without rushing yourself.

It was not my first time writing a picture book. Throughout my childhood, I sometimes wrote small picture books with illustrations. However, these books were not coherent, filled with grammatical and nonsensical errors, twisted plot lines and messy, unintelligible illustrations. But, they still were enjoyable to create and grew my passion for English and Art.

I wanted to write a small picture book for kids in the K-2 age category with cute rhyming and a happy storyline. I found it extremely difficult to write for this age group as I had to carefully stategise my language to not be too sophisticated or wordy but also make it rhyme. This added a challenge to making the sentences flow, limiting my use of vocabulary. 

Another difficulty was making each line not have too many or too little syllables, ensuring that sentences flowed. I found this was extremely hard to do without making the sentences wordy or using sophisticated vocabularly.

The most difficult thing about the illustrations was the multitude of mistakes per page. Since there was a lot of components in every illustration, it was tricky to not make a mistake sometime in each one. This meant that most of the drawings have little errors here and there, making this part of the illustrations frustrating and difficult. 

I also struggled at the start with character development and choosing styles, names and ages for each of my characters. With the help of my mentor, I settled the designs and was enabled to continue going through the process.

Overall, this project was wholesome and worthwhile. It was exciting, fun and overall a joy to be a part of.