Young Carers in Bunnyland is a picturebook commissioned and published by John Bangs from the Young Carers Alliance, written and illustrated by me, about younger young carers. The book is currently being distributed as a free resource, supported by the Carers Trust, across the UK by local councils, children's charities, and young carer's groups.
The book was developed through workshop sessions with children from Kingston Carers Network. You can find out more about the book here.
Before making this book, I was creating illustrations for a digital library to be used by the organization members of the Young Carers Alliance. I was also making a pre-assessment booklet for them and hosting creative workshops for children of Kingston Carers Network. It was around that time that we realized the potential of visual storytelling for the children: when we made up a little story behind the illustrations, the children became much more engaged during the workshops. So, we decided to turn the illustrations we had (and make additional ones, of course) into a picture book!
The book's starting point was one of the children from a previous illustration. We asked children to vote for her name during one of the workshops, and the winner was “Honey".
Bellow: the pre-assessment booklet, the illustration that gave origin to the main character, Honey, and one of the workshop sessions.
With the main character and the storyline decided, I then began drafting the story and roughly storyboarding the book. We needed to book to be short and concise so we went with 24 inside-pages. Some pages changed drastically from my initial storyboard, but the main structed remained the same:
Here are some of the finished pages from the book:
For the cover, I tested out a few colour ways, as pictured bellow, and the children from Kingston Carers Network picked the book title:
I also made a pattern using elements from the book to use as a background for the “This book belongs to” page and designed a hand-written font for the cover and cover page:
The book was launched on the 2nd of November, 2024, at the Dream Big Party Conference organized by Kingston Carers Network. You can see more about this project at the Young Carers Illustration Project website.
Besides the distributed physical copies, the book is currently available through this link as a free ebook on Apple Books.
You can also watch a reading of the book below:
Thanks for watching!