I made a book!

That's right: I wrote and illustrated a children's book and turned it into an actual thing I can hold!

At the moment I just have one copy, but I'm looking in to ways to get it mass printed.

As a teaching assistant I read a lot of children's books and I always pay attention to the illustrations. At some point I started thinking 'I could do that,' and the Easter holidays were the perfect time to try.

I started with a rough idea of the story and started sketching idea's for the pictures.

The illustrations were painted with water colours and I used colour pencils to add more definition on the images.

I scanned all the original paintings and opened them in Photoshop to resize them and edit them a little bit. Then I added the text. I kept the story pretty simple because my focus was the illustrations and, as anyone who knew me while I was doing my dissertation at uni can tell you; I am not a writer.

I searched online for the best option for printing my book and settled on Cewe photoworld because they were offering £15 for new customers. Printing it as a photobook was fine for one copy, but when I come to print more I will look elsewhere as it'll be too expensive.

The printed copy turned out great and I've already read it to my class at work. They seemed to like it.

And here's the blurb for anyone interested in what the books about!