This is the first draft of the first spread of the Children's book. This is a fantasy children's book that takes place in an African savanna. A young boy named Alemayehu is distracted by a butterfly and other interesting things, wanders out of his village, and before long finds himself in the middle of a savanna not knowing where he is where his home is. Meanwhile, the narrative of this story is different, and that's what this book is actually about, perception vs. reality. For instance, in this scene he will explain how alone he is, but in fact, the world around him is teeming with life.

This is the scene where he realizes just how lost he is. Eventually, I plan to add a lot more animals to this page.


I redid the scene and made Alemayu smaller, Each of the pages will try to show Alemayu as an unreliable narrator. The idea is to have kids actively use critical thinking in deciding what the differences are between what the main character is saying and what is actually going on.

 

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On this page, he will explain how he lives in a village that is the same old dull looking buildings.

And on this page there is foreshadowing. Hard to tell, but this is the shadow of the dragon flying over the town.

And these are spot illustrations of Alemayu being distracted instead of paying attention to the adults teaching him. I also wanted to stop in and point out here that I need to go back and lower the ear of Alemayu when his uncle is teaching him how to track animals. Instead of Alemayu having a bad hair day, here he is having a "bad ear" day.

Here is where Alemayu says that he is being brave, but in reality is crying. Meanwhile there are two concerned fantasy meerkats having a discussion over him.



This is a remake of the first illustration I ever did of this project, this time I added in texture for Drak and made him slightly smaller.