I Will Be The Morning Bird

I Will Be the Morning Bird is an illustrated children’s book based on an iconic Bangladeshi poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam. The poem খোকার সাধ (Khokar Shadh) narrates the story of a young boy who wishes to become a morning bird and wake up everyone in town to start the day. For this project, I translated the poem and reinterpreted the wonderful world Kazi Nazrul Islam created for the little boy’s dream into an illustrated story. 

The completed book contains a total of eleven spreads, a title page, endpapers, and a full cover.

Art Direction: Paul Kepple, Scott Laserow
Medium: Adobe Photoshop, InDesign

I proposed an initial illustration style inspired by the poem’s fun and playful nature. This style developed into a distinct system of Bangladesh-inspired textures, lines, and colors over the course of the project.

Each inanimate character in the book has been personified in order to mimic the way they are portrayed within the story. Sections of the poem in each spread are framed by thick decorative borders that illustrate key visual elements from the spread they are featured on. These borders are heavily inspired by the decorative hems seen on traditional Bangladeshi clothing, especially the Sari.

The theme of night and day within the poem is imposed in a number of ways using color. The color palette is limited to shades of blue, orange, and yellow only, and the passage of time is depicted with a strong color shift throughout the poem. This shift is further emphasized in the decorative frames as the blues progressively transition to oranges in a gradient to mimic the sky during sunrise.