Although the theme, activities, and main artwork or photos for the Kids Korner section of 3ABN World magazine are supplied to me each month, it is my job to create a unified look for the pages. One of the aspects of that is to create the background graphic, which I usually (but not always) try to create from scratch. Right now I am working on the August issue, and for this issue I decided to do something original.

Because the story and activity were related to ducks, I decided to go with a pond theme. So I created this simple graphic in Illustrator:

In the final piece I had to rearrange the flowers, turtle, and dragonfly to accommodate items in the page layout. The dragonfly didn’t turn out as well as I hoped, but I think it looks OK when reduced in size. If I had to do it over, I would also use a different technique to create slightly more realistic flowers (although I was purposely not wanting a photorealistic look).

If you would like to see what 3ABN World looks like, back issues are available on 3ABN’s website in PDF format, at the bottom of the page this link jumps to.