My Little Monster: A Story About OCD

Project Overview

My Little Monster: A Story About OCD by Marin Canaday uses one of children’s literature’s most versatile tools — the monster metaphor — to give OCD a shape young readers can understand and eventually face. As the girl’s intrusive thoughts and compulsions grow, so does the monster, until it feels impossible to manage alone. With the support of a kind doctor and the encouragement of those around her, she discovers that the monster can shrink — that OCD does not define her, and that she has always been capable of facing it.

The central illustration challenge was making the monster feel genuinely threatening without being traumatizing, and genuinely diminished by the end without feeling dismissive. Getting that visual arc right — scary, then manageable, then small — required careful control of scale, colour, and expression across the whole book.

Role

The central design challenge was the monster itself. Making it work as a visual metaphor required getting a very specific tonal balance right: threatening enough that children who live with OCD will recognize the feeling, but not so frightening that the book becomes traumatizing to read. The monster also needed to be capable of shrinking convincingly by the end — the resolution had to feel earned rather than dismissive, which meant the scale and color work across the full arc needed to be carefully controlled.

Full illustration across all 38 pages covered character design for the girl and the OCD monster, the visual metaphor’s emotional arc from overwhelming to manageable, age-appropriate monster design, and print-ready file preparation for Mascot Books.

Character Design

Before a single page is illustrated, I develop the main characters in full — defining their proportions, expressions, and personality. This is the foundation that keeps your characters recognizable and consistent across every scene, every lighting condition, and every emotional moment in the project.

Process

Every project follows this same structured path, so you always know where we are and what comes next. You review and approve at the sketch stage and the line art stage — nothing moves to color until you’re happy. By the time the final spread is rendered, there are no surprises.