Textures

I wasn't sure if I wanted my book to have any textures in, as these are generally considered baby books and aimed at a very young market, which doesn't really reflect the age group I am aiming at. My book is a picture book aimed at early readers, around the ages of 3-5 where children would have an adult reading to them but they can follow the story from the pictures and may be beginning to read themselves. 

Generally by this age children are past the stage where they are interested in textures and having sections of the page they can feel, but I thought it would be worthwhile to try and experiment with this anyway and see if I could make this work for my book.

One of my pages in my book is set in the park with autumn leaves falling, so I thought it would be interesting to try using real leaves as texture. Once again I used a photocopy of a layout sketch, cut out leaves to the right shape and tried to glue them on. This didn't really work, even with a stronger glue to stick them after a short amount of time the leaves began to crumble and were constantly coming off the page. 

The leaves were also very difficult to cut to shape, as the edges were very crumbly. Instead I decided to scan in a few leaves and see if they looked good with the collage when added digitally. 

This technique proved to be very effective, as it still provides the texture and interest of the leaves, but with nowhere near as much mess of them falling off, and is also much cheaper to produce than a page with sections you can feel.

I don't think having textured materials on a page works with my book. It isn't suitable to the age group I am trying to market, and isn't easy to produce whilst looking neat and professional.

However, I really like the effect of adding texture to my collages by scanning in real leaves, and this is definitely something I will incorporate into my book