This project was created in cooperation with local Croatian nonprofit organisations: Roda and Brave phone. These nonprofits have been creating a guide book together, themed around relationship between children and their imprisoned parents. In order to make the guidebook more useful and approachable for children, they were in need of some illustrations.
The Clients needed multiple illustrations, where some were imagined in detail while others were left to my own interpretation having read the guidebook. One challenge was to create enough assets that can be reused in multiple places in the guidebook, but also some very specific ones that would fall in certain places in the book.
The other challenge was to put some of the very abstract terms into an understandable and clear illustration that parents and experts can use as a tool when talking to children.
In order to answer to the abstract challenge, some illustrations were “helped” with the use of handwritten sentences or words that would illustrate a situation written about in text.
To answer to the multiple assets challenge, some illustrations were created as smaller pieces that could be used together or apart.
Example shown are the little emotive characters; as emotions are being mentioned in text multiple times, and there is a task about recognizing emotions. Client received these drawings in separate files, but also as one joined artboard that can be used in different places.
Creating illustrations is a very unique process. We started with some meetings, talks about what the experts from these two nonprofits had in mind. They were also opened to any ideas on my end, and were happy to provide feedback if they felt my ideas were on the right track or not.
I’ve sent two rounds of rough sketches their way. After the first round, we set the color direction and most of the images that will be made. In the second round, I sent a few ideas that we initially didn’t settle on. After that, I’ve sent them the full file of drawings for a final review; made small edits on a couple of illustrations, and finalised the work after.
As for the Procreate setup, I set up the files in very high quality at the beginning, setting them up mainly for print even though they would also be used in some digital forms.
For drawing: Procreate
For communication and planning: Zoom, Google Drive
