Children's Book Illustration

Spring 2023

This assignment challenged us to design a cover for a children's book. In my case, I chose to redesign the cover for "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. I've always loved Carle’s more abstract, imperfect, and playful collage-style art, so I wanted to use that as inspiration in creating funky and non-realistic illustrations for my cover–I didn’t want perfectly straight lines or circles and wanted the whole vibe to be very fun and hand-drawn. 

We were required to use the pen tool and multiple other Illustrator tools and techniques including the shape builder tool, scale, shear, or reflect tool, transform each command, blob brush or pencil tool, custom patterns, clipping masks, live paint tool, and dynamic effects. I began with some very rough preliminary sketches before bringing in my favorite sketch as a template into Illustrator to trace and work off of. Once I was in Illustrator, though, I slowly strayed away from my original sketch and ended up taking my idea in a more complex direction. My favorite part of this project was getting practice with the pen and pencil tools to draw all my food items. I also really enjoyed using the transform commands to create my rainbow swirl background and furthering the playful children's book theme by using the roughen command on the edges of the swirls. Overall, I'm very happy with how my cover turned out and how it pays homage to Carle's original collage-style artwork.