"Adunni Dares to Dream" My Illustration Process
“Adunni Dares to Dream” is a book about a young girl who grew up poor in the village in a time when expectations were much different for girls than for boys. Girls were (and in many places still are) expected to help in the home or on the farm and hope to become a mother and homemaker someday. They simply were not a priority when it came to formal education. It was rare for girls to develop a determination to break those gender barriers, even more so for a girl in a poor family. This is what makes Adunni’s journey extra inspiring. This is my first time illustrating a book for this age range so, naturally, I assumed the book would have to be colorful, clear/clean/crisp, and easy for a child to digest what’s going on. In hindsight, I may have been wrong but that was the summary of my strategy. I harked back to my college days when I was in charge of the art department in one of our student fellowships. We used to make a lot of posters using cardboard cutouts. I’d make a sketch of th
