Phantom: A Tale on Plastic Pollution

Phantom: A Tale on Plastic Pollution joins a collection of children's books on environmental and societal topics published by the Perception Change Project at the United Nations Office in Geneva. These books have been created as a way to teach young audiences about the international issues that the Sustainable Development Goals aim to resolve by 2030. In this installment, readers can follow the journey of Baby Whale and her mother as they warn both sea life and the human world about the dangers of plastic pollution after the tragic death of Phantom, the largest whale in the ocean. At the end of the story, parents and children can engage in the learning section to discover ways they can help end plastic pollution in the world's oceans.

Process: Dummy Layout

At the beginning of the project, I connected with author Kirsten Deall to discuss the storyline and her vision for the illustrations. After receiving the draft, I prepared a dummy layout with digital sketches of how each scene would be composed. Once the layouts were approved I moved on to more detailed character design.

Kirsten was interested in incorporating images of real plastic in the illustrations that showed plastic dumping sites. I tested this concept with the crab scene - this page shows the massive amount of plastic that the whale Phantom ingested.

Illustration Process

Once character designs were approved, I finished illustrating the spreads in this style. Workflow comprised of pencil sketches scanned into illustrator, where I then vectorized and brought into photoshop to add textures.

Final Book

The following are a selection of pages from the final version of Phantom: A Tale on Plastic Pollution.