Piper and the Pandemic,Emotional Story About the Coronavirus

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  Piper and the Pandemic

Inspiration: My daughter Piper has been struggling with her emotions, as have several of my 600 art students. I wanted to talk about these emotions and how normal they are, even though they are constantly changing.

What it does: The goal of this book is to reassure children that their emotional reaction to COVID19 is normal.

How I built it: I made the main character out of paper plates, creating many different mouths and eyelids to change expressions as well as some symbol elements that helped visually represent the emotions. Then I photographed the character with different mouths and symbols, took the photos into photoshop and created the backgrounds by layering images, and flattened to take it all into Word, as I could not successfully layout my book in any other program (I need to work on that).

Challenges I ran into: I am inexperienced in book layout. The easiest platform for me was Word, which surprised me. I had trouble taking the text from a google doc into photoshop and illustrator while retaining the formatting. It worked in word, but my illustrations bogged it down. I feel like I need training in this area.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of: This is my first book. I am proud of the Illustrations and how they convey the emotional roller coaster of COVID19 from the perspective of a child while explaining the basics of the Pandemic.

What I learned: I need to take a class on Book creation and Illustrating. I also learned that I enjoy using digital and non-digital tools to create my illustrations.

What's next for Piper and the Pandemic, An Emotional Story About the Coronavirus:

I hope to create and illustrate more books, taking what I learned from this project and making myself a stronger author and illustrator.

Built With

• art
• handmade
• photoshop
• word