Molly and the New Blue Hearing Aids

Julie Hughes, a teacher and educational audiologist at the 'Elizabeth Foundation', has always struggled to find stimulating and creative books to provide positive role models for pre-school deaf children. Together with a parent of a deaf child, she developed 'Molly and the New Blue Hearing Aids' with the aim of introducing basic pre school vocabularly, using sounds which occur in the early stages of speech development and to create stories centered around deaf characters.
I have approached illustrating the book by using the classroom setting as a kind of stage set which is transformed by each child's arrival with their new heaing aids and is filled with their fantasy of themselves, represented by a different colour. I have used a variety of media to create the different element of the images icluding monoprint and collage and these have been put together using photoshop.

Stegosaurus

I illustrated each line of this poem by a nine year old boy about a stegosaurus who goes for a walk, eats some leaves and gets a fright! I produced the entire full length picture book using simple potato prints and stencils in just a few days. I was particularly influenced by children's illustrators from the 60s and 70s at the time such as Eric Carle and John Burningham who were exploring the possibilities offered by full colour reprographics but didn't yet have the option of producing or manipulating their images digitally.