To the Moon and Back, Just in Time for a Snack

Project Overview

To the Moon and Back, Just in Time for a Snack by Gira Duckett (Mascot Books, September 2022) is a rhyming picture book about the most powerful vehicle in a child’s life: imagination. When art class begins, a group of children transforms their cardboard spaceship into a real one — at least as far as they’re concerned — and soars past stars and planets before landing on the moon and making it back for snack time. Duckett writes with a playful rhythm that mirrors the energy of children at play, and the story captures how naturally and completely young children commit to their own invented worlds.

The illustration challenge was making the imagined space adventure feel as vivid and real as the classroom framing it — the moon needed to feel genuinely visited, not just dreamed about, so that readers experienced the journey alongside the children rather than watching from the outside.

Role

Gira Duckett’s story runs on two visual registers at once: the classroom as it actually is, and the moon as the children believe it to be. Both needed to feel equally real and fully inhabited, because the book’s whole emotional logic depends on the reader accepting the journey as genuine. The ensemble cast of young astronauts had to be distinct enough that each child registered as an individual, while the two environments — cardboard and cosmos — had to share enough visual energy that the switch between them felt like a door opening rather than a cut.

Full illustration across all 38 pages covered character development for the classroom ensemble, building out both the real and imagined environments, and preparing print-ready files for Mascot Kids.

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.