Teacher, Tell Me What You See

Project Overview

Teacher, Tell Me What You See by Kristin Spenser (Mascot Books, March 2022) captures a specific and historic moment in childhood: the sudden shift to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the remarkable creativity with which children adapted to it. As students share their “virtual classrooms” — kitchen tables, bedroom floors, backyards — the story finds the unexpected joys alongside the genuine challenges: pets wandering into lessons, siblings appearing on screen, the strange comfort of seeing everyone’s homes. Spenser writes with the warmth of someone who observed this closely, and the result is both a document of a particular time and a timeless story about resilience.

The illustration challenge was making Zoom frames and screen interfaces feel warm and human rather than cold and digital — every virtual classroom needed to feel like a real place and a real child, not a grid of thumbnails.

Role

The illustration challenge here was fundamentally a design problem: how do you make a Zoom grid feel warm? Every spread needed to turn a screen interface into a window into a real child’s real home, with all the personality and chaos that brings — the laundry room doubling as a classroom, the siblings crowding into frame, the pet that won’t stay out of shot. The cast of students had to feel diverse and distinct enough that each home environment read as genuinely different.

Full illustration across all 38 pages covered character and environment design for the ensemble cast, building out the visual language of virtual learning across a range of home settings, and preparing print-ready files for Mascot Kids.

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.