The creators of Heartstrings Publishing are two former educators who set out to develop a social-emotional learning SEL curriculum. They needed the story characters of the curriculum brought to life, particularly Scarlett, our main character featured in each lesson.

For Scarlett, the creators envisioned a young, whimsical girl with bright red curls. I crafted several iterations of Scarlett’s style, considering the substantial number of illustrations required for the curriculum (which is around 500.) We ultimately decided on a blend of several styles, which you’ll see below. Emotive, bright, and easy to draw time and time again.

For the stories that would follow, I drew several recurring settings. This way, I could utilize them to draw scenes above. Not all of our settings recurred, but Grammy’s sidewalk and kitchen were where many lessons took place. I wanted to create comforting settings that weren’t too distracting from the foreground action.

This is just a fraction of the characters in the curriculum. Scarlett has a lot of friends! The vision was to build an eclectic cast of characters, all very different in their attitudes, interests, backgrounds, and connection to Scarlett. Our cast experiences social/emotional issues within the curriculum, and then learn healthy ways of communicating and problem solving.

The curriculum is organized by units, and broken down into weeks and days, with a story for each day. Each begins with a sotry overview, then the story, then the activities that follow. The lessons and packages themselves were laid out and designed by a design team (not me, I just illustrated!) You can view more of my illustrations and samples of the curriculum here.