With My Bear Hands

A playful rhyming picture book to help educate children about the importance of thorough hand washing to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

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Inspiration

When I was a child, I would often pretend I was an animal that used all four feet to move. I imagined that my hands were paws and before dinner, I would wash them as though I had been using them all day to walk around. Thinking about how gross they would be after using them in that way, I would really take the time needed to wash all the nooks and crannies before I sat down to eat. As I found this helpful for myself when I was a child, I figured why not share this with other children in the form of a picture book. This would allow for an easily accessible mental image that would encourage them to understand the importance of hand washing.

How I built it

I am fortunate to have some experience writing a children’s book after self-publishing my first book in 2013. Feel free to take a look at it on my website. With limited time and some previous experience, I have developed my own process to create and edit the basic framework. After writing the story in prose, I worked through each paragraph and created drawings using colored pencils and pens that I then converted into digital images and modified using Adobe Photoshop.

Challenges I ran into

The major challenges that I ran into related to the limitations of my computer. As the document is submitted as an eBook, I wanted to clean up each illustration using a digital graphic design program. Currently, the only program I have installed on my computer is a 2014 version of Adobe Photoshop. I attempted to download Illustrator from the subscription service, but I could not get it working easily on my outdated computer and did not want too waste too much time trying. Adobe Photoshop is an incredible piece of software, but the image platform is pixel-based as opposed to Adobe Illustrator, which is vector-based. Although Photoshop is capable of incredible artistic renderings and enhancements, resizing a pixel-based image can really affect the quality of the final illustration. This is different from a vector-based image which can be resized without changing the quality. To account for this, I drew my illustrations much larger, which led to an additional problem of having large file sizes that were difficult for my computer to process. Eventually I was able to get it working well by reducing the file size but required additional unnecessary time and effort.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of and what I learned

Having only heard about this Hackathon on 04/16/2020, I had 13 days to build this eBook from scratch. After completing my first draft in a little over a week, I felt overwhelmed with a sense of accomplishment. This ties into the most important thing I learned during this process, which is to have confidence in my capabilities, especially when I am passionate about achieving a difficult task.

What's next for With My Bear Hands

Creating this book came with so many benefits. As I work full-time as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, I can use it in my clinical practice to help my patients understand the importance of hand hygiene. “With My Bear Hands” will be another addition to a series of children’s books I plan to write to help teach health promotion and prevention to children.

Built With

  • adobe-photoshop-cc-2014
  • ball-point-pen
  • cannon-mg6300-series-scanner/printer
  • colored-pencils
  • sharpie-marker
  • wacom-tablet
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