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January 2023
Illustrating a children’s book is one of my bucket list goals. During my spare time, I often work on this aspiration, sometimes experimenting with different techniques. Recently, I decided to incorporate augmented reality into one of the pages I illustrated. My primary aim was to test if 2D illustrations could effectively transition into a 3D environment.
🧐 Question "How can I create engaging illustrations for a children’s book using AR techniques? Would it work to place 2D illustrations into a 3D environment?" 👩💻 Approach I mostly draw forest animals, so I decided to feature a fox as the main character of the book. Of course, I included some other forest animals as well. Coming up with a 'story' wasn't really challenging: the night before, I watched “Finding Nemo”, so “Finding Foxy” seemed appropriate. It was refreshing to revisit my Illustrator skills and extensively use the pen tool for once. While I typically draw and illustrate in Procreate, I chose Illustrator this time since I wanted to animate the illustrations. It was a lot of fun to apply everything I had just learned from a few online tutorials in practice and to see my self-conceived animals come to life!
After completing the illustrations, I had to integrate them into Unity. It was a bit challenging to get it to work, especially since I had never worked with Vuforia and Xcode before, and because I wanted to animate my illustrations, which was also a first for me. As a result, I ended up starting over at least 42 times (I lost count), but in the end, it worked!
👀 Result "Finding Foxy" is a page from an illustrated children’s book that demonstrates the promising possibilities of making a simple illustration more immersive by using AR technologies. The 2D illustrations in the 3D environment give it a particular look. What do you think? Does it work?