When my husband and I were approaching our first wedding anniversary, I was pregnant with our first baby. I considered a few different gifts, but wanted to be really creative.
I had this idea to create a children’s book of “our story” to give to him to read to our new baby when she arrived.
It took a lot of work and a lot of time, but it was so worth it and really, really cool.
At the time, we were in the process of decorating our new baby’s nursery in a ‘giraffe’ theme. Since this gift was partially a gift to her as well, I made the main characters in the book giraffes.
I then wrote out “our story” of how we met, dated, fell in love, and married, and divided it into about 19 separate parts, since the book I wanted would be about 20 pages long.
The hardest part was illustrating the book. Let me tell you – I am no artist. I watched (many) video tutorials on YouTube on how to draw giraffes and other things and then went to work with pencil on plain sheets of paper.
First I decided what to draw to match the text on each “page” I wanted. Then, using a regular pencil, I drew the illustration. When I was happy with it, I used colored pencils to draw over the lines and color it in. I had many (many!) attempts for each page— this part took more than two months of drawing in my spare time!
When I finally finished the illustrations, I scanned them all onto the computer and saved them as image files. Then I went onto Shutterfly.com to create a photobook. I used one illustration per page and added my desired text on top of the photo of my illustration. Voila!
It took a little tweaking here and there because I hadn’t drawn the illustrations the correct size, even though I thought I had, but it ended up working out well.
I incorporated into the ‘story’ things about us and our relationship. For example, we met in Brazil – I spent a lot of time tediously coloring the infamous black and white patterned streets of Ipanema and Copacabana.
We went hang gliding together in Brazil, so I illustrated that. (P.S., it’s not easy to draw pictures of giraffes hang gliding.)
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Featured image credit: Shutterstock
Tim Thomas is a renowned writer and entrepreneur specializing in finance, investing, and money matters. With his extensive knowledge and experience in the financial sector, Tim offers valuable insights into the world of personal finance, stock market trends, and investment strategies.
