Living Christmas Tree

Project Overview

Living Christmas Tree by Kristin Sponaugle (Mascot Books, September 2021) is a Family Choice Award-winning holiday picture book built on one of the season’s most magical premises: what if the Christmas tree itself were alive? When night falls in the Miller home, Hannah and William witness something extraordinary — their tree springs into action, showing them the spirit of Christmas in ways they could never have imagined. Sponaugle writes with a sense of wonder that never tips into sentimentality, keeping the magic feeling genuinely surprising rather than expected.

The illustration challenge was making the tree’s animation feel visually delightful and distinct from the static daytime scenes — the shift from an ordinary decorated tree to a living, moving presence needed to feel like a real transformation on the page, with light, colour, and expression doing the work that words alone couldn’t carry.

Role

The central design challenge was the tree itself. Hannah and William needed to feel warm and expressive, but the living tree had to be the visual heart of the book — a character that reads as genuinely inhabited and joyful rather than just an object with a face. The shift from the static daytime scene to the animated nighttime version had to feel like a real transformation: a change in light quality, colour temperature, and emotional atmosphere that the reader could feel without being told.

Full illustration across all 38 pages covered character design for Hannah and William, the animated tree as a principal character with its own expression range, the daytime-to-evening visual transition, holiday interior lighting 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.