The Shine Project - Zimbabwe

You never know where your next project is going to come from... Often it's the most unexpected of places! This project was pitched to me thanks to Instagram of all things! A past acquaintance of mine saw my climate change sketches on Instagram last week and approached me with the opportunity to create illustrations for a children's book for The Shine Project in Zimbabwe, which she works on.

The Shine Project seeks to improve sanitation, nutrition and education amongst children in Zimbabwe, and they wanted to create an illustrated children's book aimed at 2-4 yr olds and their mothers. Despite being incredibly busy right now (about 5 projects on the go at once eeeek) I couldn't turn this down because it was just such a wonderful project and it fit so seamlessly with my dissertation!


I'll be designing about 8 pages in total which focus on the alphabet and basic numbers in a story format. Lots of bright colours and pattern is what I'm aiming for in  the design. I'd love to have weeks/months to work on this ideally but the turn around is ridiculously tight thanks to shipping deadlines. We have to have it designed and 3000 copies printed and ready to be shipped in 3 weeks time!!! CRAZY!

In order to make it as culturally relevant as possible I've been looking at Zimbabwean screen-printed textiles and taking inspiration from the colours and patterns in them. They're just gorgeous! So I've been making images by dying paper with brusho and then using a quill dipped in bleach to mimic the batik effects here.