Green Wellies Publishing

FOLLOW THE TALES OF JACK THROUGH THE FARMER IN TRAINING BOOK SERIES.

Follow Jack’s family throughout the seasons on the family farm, taking the reader through all to familiar moments in the farming year, from a day out at the local show to lambing time.

THE PROJECT

Anwen Nicholls approached PixelHaze to help bring her vision to life. In her spare time, away from the family farm and job as an English teacher, Anwen had been working on creating a series of children's books. These books were inspired by real events on her family's farm. Instead of the idyllic version of farming which many children’s books often convey, Anwen’s stories are inspired by real events, similar to ‘Clarkson’s Farm’ (For kids). Even the character share their likeness with her own family. These characters include Jack the farmer’s son who wants to become a farmer, just like his dad when he grows up. This is where the series gets its name ‘Farmer in Training’.

With all four stories written and ready to go, Anwen needed someone to help illustrate, publish and market these books. This is where we came in. Sitting down with Anwen we sketched out a number of different character designs and storyboards for the books, we went through dozens of various character designs and styles for the main protagonist ‘Jack’ before we settled with the character we see today.

OUR SOLUTION

When creating the illustrations we used Adobe Illustrator on both the iPad and Mac to digitise this artwork. We opted to create the artwork digitally instead of hand drawing each individual page as we could recycle the various assets in future content, making each new book easier to create. After we finished the first book in the series, Shearing Day we had all the illustrations to be able to start creating the other books. These books include Lambing Time, The Show, and Sheep in the Garden.

Alongside the books, we needed a platform to help market and promote them. We created our own Squarespace website which used the same illustrations and styles throughout the books to keep on brand. This was a nice change of pace for the PixelHaze team as usually, we work on more corporate and professional websites which don't allow us to be as playful. Mainly using Illustrator, we were able to create brushstroke effects on each section which gave the impression of mud being splattered outlining the messy nature of farming (You need to get your hands dirty on the farm!) Most of the layouts for the website were created inside Adobe Illustrator and then ported into Squarespace as images with very little use of custom CSS.

The brand ‘Green Wellies Publishing’ uses the same illustration style as the books, playing around with the typography in the logo where switched out the two L's for two green boots, an iconic item all young farmers wear on whilst at work. This acts as an overarching brand under which the learning material, different book series, and other ventures will come under.

The first batch of prints for the first book in the farming training series Shearing day will be out in the coming months. We look forward to seeing where Green Wellies takes us next!

Stay tuned for more.