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

• Character design (the girl and her OCD monster)
• Full book illustration across all pages
• Visual metaphor development and emotional arc illustration
• Monster design that reads as threatening but age-appropriate
• Print-ready file preparation