Josie’s a Stickler for Stickers

Occasionally I work on self-publisher books that are not intended for the open market - they are just private publications for family and friends. Often these books are written by grandparents, and I give them just as much love as I do my other projects - be they traditionally published for publishing houses, or self-published.

Josie’s a Stickler for Stickers by Beverley Knezevic is one such book. I have done a number of books for Beverley, as she made the mistake of writing a book for the first grandchild, and now they’ve multiplied quite a bit! Most of her grandkids live overseas, so a picture book is a lovely way to celebrate them, and to help the other grandkids learn about their cousins as well.

A fun thing about working for Beverley is that I can experiment a bit more with style. This book contained a lot of stickers, and we wanted to keep the budget down, so I decided to make use of a feature of Adobe Fresco on my iPad - the ability to mix raster (pixel) and vector images in the one document. This meant each sticker only had to be drawn once, as a vector image, and could be resized and manipulated easily without loss of quality, saving time (and therefore budget)

I debated about the rest of the book, and in the end decided that it would be fun to have a very traditional, painterly style for the rest of the book (still done digitally), so that the stickers were really a feature and stood out as different.

Every sticker was drawn in vector, allowing me to resize at will and use them on various pages.

The difference between the ‘book world’ style and the ‘sticker’ style meant that it was easy to make each sticker look ‘like a sticker’ rather than just ‘part of the illustration’

And a bonus of creating all the stickers as vector images is that I can create sticker sheets from them, both to go with the book, and for my own purposes (as I own the copyright on the images)

This was a fun book to work on, as I’m pleased with how the contrast between the two styles ended up working to further the storyline and enhance the text.