I really enjoyed this project. As soon as it was announced i had a character in mind. This is because i have been designing things in my spare time for about a year with this ‘Sad Ghost’ character. So being able to use it in one of my projects it was very fun.
My sister is a primary school teacher so we have loads of examples of children’s books in the house which helped me with the project. One of the best examples i found was the Pigeon series by Mo Willems. These are very simply drawn and have a clear style to them which i wanted to emulate.
The style i went with is cool toned colours and a theme of the all the characters having the same eyes (which would carry on to other books if i were to do more). I am much more comfortable in Adobe Illustrator so this project really leant itself to my existing skills.
The difficult theme of the breif was probably the hardest thing to come up with. At first i started with doing about alcoholism. I havent encountered this in my life (with any family) so it was hard to think of a child friendly narrative around this topic. It was hard to fit it into the story with the ghost and make it relatable for children, so i changed my idea to Internet safety and being lonely.
Internet safety is very important in todays society as everyone (including children) are using social media these days. My book handles all sides of this issue; being the one who is lying to make themselves look cooler so people will like them, giving out your personal information, talking to people you don’t know and them turning out not to be the person you expected. Hopefully this will teach children that it is important to both be yourself, and be careful. I think this book could easily be used in schools when being taught about safety from a young age. The language in the book i kept simple with some words that could trick the young reader like “Yacht” this is a word a child has unlikely to have encountered in other books and therefore will expand their vocabulary.
All in all i am very proud of my children’s book and will be getting it printed to see how my sister’s (year 4) class react to it next week.
I wouldnt change much about this book if i could start again, but would like to carry on with a series of books (with difficult topics similar to the one in Ghost with the Most). The only thing i would change would be to improve some of the drawings like the female ghost at the end looks a bit rushed in my opinion.