Peter Pan

One particular unit of Language Arts Skills at Miacademy is focused on an adaptation of Peter Pan. The text itself is altered slightly, and not all chapters are a part of the unit. The goal of adding illustrations and/or comics to this was to entice readers to continue reading on. We also wanted to align the assets within the illustration with what we wanted readers to notice.

This course is geared towards 5th graders, and you’ll notice each illustration has a myriad of details. The biggest focal points of the lessons I worked on were perspective, figurative language, tone, and symbolism. This is one of the first times in the 5th grade curriculum students are interacting with a fantasy text, and the illustrations are intended to enhance that experience as well as make it more accessible to assist students in visualization.

We of course had to be sure that the designs were true to the selected text of the story while not veering too closely towards existing IP. I also wanted to keep a consistent color language, and accomplished this through a series of overlays placed over local color once. For borders and decorative elements, I took inspiration from my heavy research into the works of Jan Brett and Trina Schart Hyman, as well as several others.