A book I'm illustrating for my Children's Book Illustration class. It's based on a South African folktale about how the stars were born. Naledi, who loves the sun, and her brother Noli, who loves the moon and stars, learn the story of the Star's Road and Naledi in the end, finds out the sun IS a star. The folktale is public domain, published in Outa Karel's Stories in 1914. Naledi and Noli are my original characters. Here are some of the pages:
This is the copyright and dedication page. Typeface and placement are tentative as of now.
The first page of the book. Introduces Naledi and her love for the sun.
Here Noli is introduced a few pags later, mimicking the layout of the first page and juxtagposing brother and sister.
This page shows a fun interaction between Noli and Naledi, a typical brother teasing his sister. I wanted to make them believable, flesh them out separately from the story, so the reader would feel more invested throughout the 32 pages.
And this page is toward the end, when the story is over and Naledi has a new perspective. As the narrator, she is recalling her childhood in this story, so these pages above and below serves to bring us back to the present.
Hands are a recurring theme for this book. They're intimate, interactive, and emotive. I didn't plan it at first, but I noticed that I really enjoyed these close-up pages with hands being the main actors. My hands are important to me, and I'm sure they're important to most, and I feel like they have a strong story-telling quality.
I updated some pages, sans-text, so as not to give the story away entirely :) Thanks for looking at a bit of my book. I'll be sending it to publishers soon! Fingers crossed!
