For my picture book brief I decided to focus on Social Anxiety Disorder. Overall I think the Book Brief went well. I didn’t leave my self a lot of time to finish it in but with the time frame I had I think that it turned out ok. I decided to go with simple illustrations because of the shortage of time and put my emphasis on telling the story through the composition and colour. I thought making the protagonist a lighter shade would make her stand out. I also made her slightly bigger than the other bunnies. This is to reinforce how alone and isolated she feels because of her anxiety. I decided to use bunnies rather than people because animals are simply cuter and make it easier to convey a difficult message like Social Anxiety Disorder to children. I think the font I picked, KidPrint, works really well with the illustrations. It is reminiscent of a child’s handwriting but legible enough to read. In the end I think the minimalist style of the book works effectively and conveys the story well with little supportive text which is common in picture books.
There are some aspects of the book that I would like to improve. The illustration on some of the pages is noticeably pixelated. I probably should have used Adobe Illustrator rather than Photoshop to do my illustrations. I would also like to experiment more with my drawing pad. I felt that the images I’ve made for the colour experimentation could potentially be developed into good children book illustrations which could’ve end up as more captivating that these. Another thing I would like to improve upon is to actually make the full book. The pages I did make are supposed to represent only a few of the spreads. Because the spreads had pages of the story missing in between it didn’t make much sense. I decided to add additional text to make it seem like a whole book even tho it isn’t. I would also improve the illustrations by making the bunnies’ eyes look in a different direction on pages 1 and 3. This is because the illustrations seem too repetitive.
