We sat down with Aaron Cushley to talk all about his illustrative process behind A Boy Called Book written by Vincent Ralph, published by scholastic.

In your own words, what is A Boy Called Book about?

To me A Boy Called Book is about learning who you are, discovering that there are many parts and ‘chapters’ we go through and embracing it all, the good, the bad, the sad parts and the happy ones.

Tell me about your illustrative process, what inspired you?

My process is sometimes my strength and my weakness, because I’ll obviously have initial thoughts when I read the draft of the book first, so I try to just sketch out some initial characters, focusing on the main one, in this case ‘Book’ (the character) sort of ended up being how I first sketched him.

The trickiest part was the monsters as I had to make them somewhat scary, yet friendly enough that they weren’t deterring to any younger readers, so they took a few tries before we got them right. I’ve worked mostly traditionally with this book, working about 70% on paper and using procreate to touch up the spreads.

What was your favorite part of working on A Boy Called Book?

Oh that was probably the trial and error, there’s so much that readers don’t get to see, you’re working for months on a book and you’re inevitably going to have a sketchbook, or twos worth of drafts, sketches, marks and smudges that when you look at them alone you wonder just what it is.

Why is this book important to you?

It’s important because it has a very special message I think a lot of children don’t hear enough, that they are not just one thing, we sort of box ourselves into areas early on based on what interests us, and that’s a disservice to our growth as no one just is just one thing, we’re a story that has its ups, its downs, and I think for however long they’re in it, our family are the chapters we remember most. I hope people come away from this book feeling optimistic about who they can be, because their story is still being written.

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Get your copy of A Boy Called Book here.

To work with Aaron, get in contact with his agent Amy Fitzgerald here.