Primary Paintsville

Project Overview

Primary Paintsville by Gabrielle Waldman uses colour as a playful, immediately visual metaphor for diversity and acceptance. When Gary Green moves to a town where everyone is a primary colour, his difference makes the community uneasy — they don’t know how to welcome someone who doesn’t fit the palette they’re used to. Gary’s response is not confrontation but creativity: he uses kindness and imagination to help his classmates and teacher see that colour becomes richer, not poorer, when more of it is present. Gabrielle Waldman keeps the metaphor working consistently without letting it become laboured, and the result is a story that is both genuinely funny and genuinely warm.

The illustration challenge was designing a world in which colour itself carried the full emotional logic of the story — every character’s hue, every combination and contrast, needed to feel intentional and visually coherent from the first page to the last.

Role

The illustration challenge was designing a world in which colour itself carried the full emotional logic of the story. Every character’s hue, and every combination and contrast between them, needed to feel intentional and visually coherent from the first page to the last.

Full illustration across the book covered character design for Gary Green and the primary colour community cast, colour-as-character visual system design across the whole book, community environment illustration in a stylised colour-coded world, and print-ready file preparation.

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.