Posted by Sweta RC March 26, 2026

Trace & Learn: Counting Board Book

How This Baby Board Book Project Began

Why This Project Exists

This project started during the Make Art That Sells bootcamp, where the text was given as an assignment by Zoe Tucker, under the guidance of Lilla Rogers and Zoe Tucker.

It honestly turned out to be such a meaningful learning experience for me.

Through the process, I began to really understand what goes into making a baby board book. Things that seem simple at first are actually very intentional:

Characters need clear, readable emotions
They should feel friendly and non-threatening
Big eyes help toddlers read expressions more easily
Backgrounds work best when they are simple and uncluttered
Even small objects need to be clear and recognizable
Colors should feel bright, cheerful, and inviting

One part I personally loved was creating characters out of fruits and vegetables. That idea instantly clicked with me, and I knew I wanted to explore it as much as I could.

What I Looked At Before Starting

Before jumping into drawing, I spent time going through the assignment material and Zoe’s video. I made notes of anything that caught my attention—sometimes small details, sometimes bigger ideas.

I also looked at the work of illustrators like:

At one point, I even took

Vintage Illustration for Engaging Children’s Books by Ingela Peterson Arrhenius on Domestika. That really helped shape how I was thinking about style and simplicity.

Building My Own Visual Boards

I separated each piece of text into different Google Slides and started building little idea boards for every page.

I filled them with:

Reference photos
Character ideas
Actions and moods
Anything that felt right for that piece of text

Then came a phase I really enjoyed—I just kept drawing fruits and vegetables over and over again. On rough paper, in notebooks, on random scraps… just trying to understand their shapes.

Somewhere in that repetition, I started to see characters inside those shapes.

Once a few personalities started to emerge, I held onto those traits and slowly carried them across all the other fruits and vegetables so everything felt like it belonged in the same world.

Idea boards

From Shapes to Personalities

This part felt very organic.

I wasn’t forcing characters at the beginning—I was just observing shapes and sketching. But gradually, certain expressions and attitudes started showing up.

Once I found a few that felt right, I began:

Refining them
Repeating those features
Making sure they worked across different fruits and vegetables

Then I moved into sketching the actions mentioned in the text, trying to see how these characters would move and behave.

This stage felt like a conversation between me and the drawings—figuring things out as I went.

And then there were the French beans.

They were surprisingly difficult for me. The shape is so thin that it felt challenging to give them enough personality without losing what makes them… them.

I remember getting a bit stuck at that point.

But then, almost out of nowhere, I remembered how much I didn’t like eating French beans as a child. And how my older sisters would still make sure I ate them anyway—in that very big sister way where you don’t really have much of a choice.

That memory stayed with me for a while as I worked.

And then another one surfaced—something from my childhood during the Doordarshan days. I remembered seeing a small animated clip where vegetables were sitting in a basket, talking and interacting in a really fun, lively way.

I hadn’t thought about that in years.

When I came back to the text—“4 French beans rocking”—something suddenly clicked.

I thought… why not make them a rock band?

That idea changed everything.

Instead of fighting their thin shape, I started using it:

It worked with movement
It added rhythm
It gave them energy

They stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling like some of the most fun characters in the set.

This is the part of the process I enjoy the most—when something isn’t working, and then a small memory or idea quietly shifts everything.

It’s never a straight path. It’s a lot of pausing, remembering, trying again… and slowly finding something that feels right.

Understanding the Space

I spent some time researching board book sizes to understand the actual space I was working with.

I settled on:

6 x 6 inches per page
12 x 6 inches per spread

That decision helped ground everything that came after.

My Workflow (A Bit Messy, But It Worked)

I started with thumbnails on paper, keeping the page ratio in mind. After a few explorations, I scanned my sketches and began arranging them digitally using Affinity Photo.

From there:

I created rough layouts
Added text and margins in Affinity Publisher
Exported pages as JPEGs

At the same time, I was refining my character sketches in Procreate.

Then came color.

I used a technique I learned from

How To Create A Perfect Color Palette For Digital Art by Gia Graham, and applied it to build palettes for each spread.

I blocked colors in Procreate first, then moved everything into Affinity Designer because I wanted the final output to be vector.

One thing I really enjoyed was using textured brushes to keep a slightly rough, hand-drawn feel—even within vector work.

Also, a small personal moment I loved:

I reused an old rainbow texture I had made years ago (just as a warm-up exercise back then!) and turned it into ribbons for eggplant characters. It felt nice to finally give that texture a purpose.

The Idea

While working on the layouts, I came across board books where kids can trace letters and numbers.

I thought—why not add that here?

It felt like a nice way to go beyond just counting.

So I added:

Dotted numbers
Small circular guides for tracing

What Didn’t Work

After a few days, I paused and really questioned it.

I cut paper to the actual size and tested it physically. That’s when I realized something important:

The numbers were only about 1 x 1 inch.

That’s just not practical for a toddler to trace.

It was a slightly disappointing moment—but also a very useful one. It reminded me that ideas that sound good don’t always work in reality, especially when designing for kids.

Reworking the Layout

I went back and rethought the design.

This time:

I moved the numbers to the right side of the page
Made them larger and easier to trace
Adjusted characters and backgrounds around them

Thankfully, I had organized my files well, so making these changes wasn’t as painful as it could have been. I definitely appreciated that in this phase.