Hands at Work

Both Rachel and Samantha are designers/ artists/ illustrators at the core. We love spending our time making, creating and getting our hands dirty. For this partnership hands at work has been slightly different than usual, with both ladies taking on new and exciting challenges.

Rachel spends most of her time drawing, the challenge she chose to take on with the Uh-Oh Books project was to add colour. Hare Raising Designs has a clear influence from Natural History, which was important to continue in the new project.

We decided early on that we wanted to create a beautiful yet mature book which can appeal to children without over cutesy-ing the imagery and topics. It was important to keep the design style, however most of Hare Raising Design’s creations are black and white designs. For a children’s book it is so incredibly important to create beautiful, bold and colourful illustrations… so Rachel turned to watercolours. The result has been stunning, creating incredible bold and beautiful watercolour designs with intricate details added in fine-liner.

For Samantha her hands took on a new challenge for this project too, but in a very different way. With a primary background in design and secondary experience in business and marketing, Samantha took on a creative writing focus for this project before then turning primarily to marketing, planning and business tasks.

Writing the story was an incredible experience for Samantha, having loved writing for as long as she could remember. The challenge came from the need to finalise a full story. Finding it easy to sit with a notebook and write the first section, deciding the ending became much more challenging. This was nothing compared to the editing, adding and changing the story which was a completely new experience. Resulting in hours spent typing, researching, reading and a lot of deleting and retyping!

These busy hands at work of both Rachel and Samantha has resulted in a children’s book they are incredibly proud of and can not wait to share with children and parents everywhere.

Sam, Rachel & Flo x