The Crane Princess
Laine Hamamura is an author who lives in Hawaii. We have stayed friends since middle school when I lived in Kaneohe, HI, and I was delighted when she hired me to help bring her story to life. I used a real paper texture for the moon and painted the artwork digitally with Photoshop and Procreate. I added the text with InDesign. I selected a font for the title with a refined and epic personality. I wanted to show the bittersweet mixture of joy and sorrow that the main character, Mai, experiences in this retelling of a Japanese folktale. I used design thinking to solve the problem of how to represent the duality of Mai, who is part human, part crane. The wing of the crane has a human face, which is framed by black feathers, which also double as hair. I then was able to execute this design concept with my digital painting skills in Photoshop.
