Do It Afraid: How I Illustrated My First Children’s Book With “Unpolished” Design Skills
When people hear I wrote and illustrated a children’s book, they assume the writing was the hard part.
It wasn’t.
The writing took less than a week. The story came easily, with help from the kiddos in my life who chimed in with edits and plot tweaks. I had grammar support, but the flow was already there. What stopped me in my tracks? the pictures.
I almost didn’t finish because I didn’t think I was “good enough” to illustrate a book. The original idea was to let the kids illustrate it, then i looked for a professsional illustrator. I even considered AI-art for it. But then i decided to just start.
The Fear That Almost Stopped Me
I had a vision. I wanted Theodora and the Storm to feel like a felt book, textured, soft, warm. Something you could almost run your hand across and feel love sewn into the pages.
But I didn’t know how to make that yet. I didn’t have fancy tools ( just Affinity Designer2, and it kept crashing on me) or years of design training ( I few years of email and social grphic design in drag and drop builders, and a CalArts certification were my starting point) What I did have was a basic understanding of shapes, gradients, and texture, and a willingness to experiment.
That’s where the breakthrough came.
From Fear to Felt (Sorta)
I had already started designing characters for another project (Noah & Victory), and in that process, I realized something powerful: with a little intentionality, simple shapes can communicate so much. A circle becomes a face. A line becomes a tree branch. A shadow creates depth. Suddenly, design didn’t feel unreachable.
So I shifted gears. I leaned into:
- Light and gradients to simulate depth
- Noise and texture to add warmth
- Simple shapes + contrast to establish relationships
- Composition and placement to tell emotional stories
Every page was a study in “what do I know how to do right now?” and “how can I make that enough?”
And it was enough.
Letting Theodora Lead Me
Theodora’s story is about healing, legacy, and the things storms leave behind. She taught me something as I built her world: we don’t have to be perfect to grow. We just have to keep going.
Her scars didn’t stop her from bearing fruit.
Mine didn’t stop me from finishing this book.
For Anyone Sitting on a Dream
If you’re waiting to feel “ready” before you start, please don’t.
Just start with what you have, and what you need will arrive as you need it. Sketch with stick figures. Write messy drafts. Build broken things. Do it afraid. It can take years to master all the skills to be perfect at something. So why wait? Because your story matters just as much now as it would after you’ve mastered every skill.
Theodora and the Storm is now published. Not because I felt confident the whole time, but because I trusted the message enough to carry it through.
And I hope it carries you, too.
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Available Apple Books and Google Books.
sassystephb.com 
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