Our client, Shima Shanti, of Peace Waters Publishing came to us with a collection of illustrations and text to combine and arrange into a children’s book. The picture book design and layout needed something to tie all the pages together and unify the collection of drawings. I came up with the idea of using stock images of abstract watercolors in the backgrounds of all the pages to enhance and support the drawings.

My designer, Kerrie Lian looked at the book one spread at a time to coordinate the watercolor backgrounds with the colors, patterns and imagery in the drawings. Shown below are 3 sample double-page spreads.

Shima loved the results and we had fun designing the book. The most difficult part was narrowing down the plethora of choices of abstract watercolor backgrounds. Shima’s book, Hats I Am is available on Amazon.com and at Peace Waters website.