The Day Nana Lost Her Name!

How I wrote and illustrated it...

without an illustrator and no AI!

The concept had been swirling around in my head for a while and I knew I wanted to make a book predominantly for 'Kiwi' kids, and one step further from that was that I wanted to introduce some common te reo Māori words and phrases too. 'Turn on your taringa' is one phrase I really like!

My whānau loved the concept too so I felt it could be something to persevere with. I wrote/rewrote/edited/and started the story from scratch a couple of times, spent a lot of time looking up words in the Te Aka Māori Dictionary and asked my daughters for their clarification for translation of certain phrases/words that I couldn't figure out.

The idea was the easy part. However, once I started looking down the self-publishing road and realising the cost of an illustrator (that wasn't AI) was a bit much for me to pay for my 'first' publication, I started fiddling about in Canva (luckily one of my happy places)

I bought a package with customisable characters including bodies, hairstyles, eyes, noses, mouths etc, clothing and accessories and used graphics from Canva for everything else. The only thing is the body images are static and can't move, ie can't be side on, head to one side, jumping, dancing etc, so at times I had to be extremely creative - when Manaia was 'shrugging' her shoulders, I cut off the lower part of her arms and added the cut off part in a different position to make it look like she had her forearms in the air. Personally, I would have loved to see more 'movement' in the illustrations but there was only so much I could do!

I really enjoyed creating the characters and I immediately liked the hairstyle, glasses and mouth I found for Nana but overall, there was not a big choice of clothing and accessories, so I had to adapt, for instance Nikau's T shirt originally had the words 'Little Princess' on it (I was pretty sure he wouldn't want to wear one of those so I blanked it out!) and Māmā's earrings are a 'leaf' 'graphic' I found that was black and then changed to green.

It all took time. As I started to set up the pages with the images, I found I had to change the text slightly. I ordered proof copies and waited for them to arrive from Amazon US, then realised some colours just didn't work, the text was often too close to the spine, the rugby posts didn't line up over two pages, Nikau had green eyes in one picture and brown eyes in the other, there were macrons missing, some speech marks were missing etc etc etc...ordered yet another proof - then I was finally ready to push 'P' for 'publish'. It was super exciting to hold the final version at last. And, I have a few more ideas I am currently working on...

I hope you enjoy reading my little book,

Arohanui,

Laraine