When I was 6-years old, my parents bought me an ABC-book to prep me for school. I remember I got really excited, because I thought it was some magic that brought illustrations and letters together. Of course at the beginning I couldn´t figure out for the life of me why I had to read aloud “B” as “bee” instead of “baɪ”, when the illustration next to the letter was a bicycle. 🙂
Anyway, as I got older, I noticed that children in my family were just as curious about matching letters with illustrations as I used to be. So when my niece was at the age to start school, I thought I would make ABC-cards to her. The idea turned into a project which turned into a collection of cards which in the end turned into a whole alphabet book. After some Pinterest-search for good ideas, I took my beloved Derwent watercolor pencils to start the drawing and coloring from A till Z (namely till “Zs”, as the Hungarian alphabet ends with “zs”). I got some animals, fruits, veggies and some easy to recognise objects, like a tie or a drum. I know, these are not the most original ideas to go with, but my aim was to keep the illustrations simple and easy to match with the corresponding letters. Besides drawing, I wrote all the letters and words with the original school-style handwriting. So on the one side of the cards there are the printed letters and on the other side the handwritten ones with illustrations.
As it was a side-project to me, it took about half a year to finish it. And it was so worth it! 🙂 My niece learnt the letters with these cards and hopefully other kids will also have some fun with them. The cards are now organized into a tiny, spiral-bind book, so it´s easy to turn the pages.
For now here are some pictures I took when I was preparing the cards for print, the shots of the final books will come later. 🙂
-Petra
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