Shrooman, by Charlize Bernhardt, is a children’s picture book that follows the story of a little girl learning about fungi and their ecological value. Its use of colorful, engaging illustrations and age-appropriate text helps hold the interest of a young audience and aids children in understanding the narrative and message of the book. The folded trim size of the book is 10” by 8’’. Two versions were created: one to be saddle stitched, with 48 pages across 24 spreads, and one to be perfect bound, with a wrapped cover and an additional 48 inside pages.

The illustrations were created digitally in ProCreate for the iPad Pro. Careful attention was paid to composition and perspective, leaving ample dedicated space for text, and simulating movement and emotion to hold young reader’s attention. The colors of the characters are bright, saturated, and placed over more neutrally colored backgrounds to draw the reader’s eye to the action. The page background’s content and color change to support the mood of the illustration. The cover of the book shows an illustration of the title character, Shrooman, on a colorful background with his arms outstretched as if welcoming the reader in. The book also contains a title page, repeating the title on a colorful background, end pages with the common name, scientific name, and a fun fact about each mushroom character shown in the story, in addition to a glossary of vocabulary terms. The back cover has parts of an illustration from the book showing an important plot point, in combination with a short description of the story’s conflict that entices the reader to find out how the story ends.

The font Futura PT Medium was chosen for the narration text, as it contains easily distinguishable letters, large counters, and uses single-story a’s and g’s, which all help make the text easier to read for beginner readers. The dialogue text is hand-lettered, while maintaining a style easy for children to read. The variations in the letters and the style of the type add personality and work well with the hand-drawn, cartoony style of the illustrations. The color of each piece of dialogue text corresponds with the character that is speaking it.

Below are the images of Shrooman’s covers and a selection of a few inside spreads. The entire book is not available online, as it is in the process of being published and sold commercially.