Playing around with composition can be liberating.

I have 3 beautiful nieces who are very bright and inquisitive. I’d been looking for a story that I could tell using photograph, illustration and text. When I suddenly realised that our little walks and yarden experiments would be a great starting point.

In the above image my niece is talking to our shadows after a brief conversation about bumble bees. I’ve started toying with ideas and layouts, but it’s very preliminary at the moment. I would like to bring in more illustrated elements. Nice line drawings of the girls learning different things about our environment.

I will make some more with the characters of my nieces and I, using photographs as a base. (I’m not so great at drawing).

I’m going to create the book as a concertina fold out adventure. I have some lovely cardboard postage boxes that will work out as lovely gateways for the journeys to start from.

I also may let the characters be free moving independent pieces of paper, so that they can walk through the story. Fixing them to the box housing with parcel string.

This is more of a test print or mood board. In need of refinement, but they could be pretty cute.