Some of the most useful work behind an A Little Big World story happens long before a finished illustration appears on the page.
Recently, one of the tools helping with that work has been Blender.
I first used Blender around six years ago, but after a long time away from it, I decided to pick it up again. This time, I had a fairly specific reason: to explore how Blender could help with children’s book illustration planning and make the world around our characters more consistent from page to page.
The idea isn’t to create the finished illustrations in 3D. Instead, Blender gives me a simple space where I can build a scene, move the camera around, test proportions and work out where everything belongs before developing the final artwork.
Coming back to software after six years away is an interesting experience.
There are plenty of things I’ve forgotten, but I’ve also found that Blender feels much more approachable than I remember.
I suspect my work as a Revit modeller has something to do with that. Spending years working with 3D models, views and spatial relationships has made moving around a virtual scene feel much more natural this time around.
Of course, Revit and Blender are very different tools, but there is enough familiar thinking between them that I haven’t felt like I’m starting completely from scratch.
For A Little Big World, I also don’t need to build beautifully detailed 3D models.
A bench can be a few simple pieces of timber. A shed only needs enough detail to establish its shape. Pickle certainly doesn’t need every feather modelled.
The important part is knowing where those things are.
Keeping a story visually consistent can become surprisingly complicated.
If Pickle walks past a shed on one page, ducks beneath a bench on another and circles around a feed tin later, those objects need to feel as though they belong to the same place.
Their size and position matter. So does the height of the camera, the direction the characters are travelling and what should be visible in the background.
That is where using Blender for children’s book illustration planning becomes useful.
Instead of trying to remember every relationship from one illustration to the next, I can build a simple version of the environment and move around inside it.
I can test whether a camera angle feels too high, whether a character is getting lost behind an object, or whether a scene would work better from the opposite side.
It doesn’t have to look pretty.
It just has to answer the right questions.
Today I put that approach to work on our upcoming story, Pickle and the Smallest Shadow.
In one part of the story, Pickle takes a rather unnecessary route around the farmyard while one very small chick follows faithfully behind her.
One of those moments takes them beneath a low wooden bench, with the shed, grass and an old milk tin nearby.
Before developing the finished illustration, I built a rough version of that area in Blender.
The models are deliberately simple. Their job is to help establish scale, position and perspective rather than to resemble the finished artwork.
Once the scene was built, I could move the camera down close to Pickle’s level and experiment with the composition until the bench felt large overhead, the chick remained visible behind her and the other objects sat naturally in the background.
That gave me a much clearer starting point for the finished page.
The comparison between the Blender scene and the finished illustration is probably my favourite part of the experiment.
The 3D version is basic.
There are simple shapes, plain surfaces and just enough detail to understand what is happening.
But underneath the finished illustration, much of the same structure is still there.
The bench is in the right place. The milk tin sits beyond it. The shed establishes the background, and the camera remains down near the chickens rather than looking at them from above.
That means more of the creative work can go into the characters, atmosphere and storytelling without having to solve the entire scene again from scratch.
I’m still relearning Blender, so this is very much the beginning of the experiment.
But I can already see it becoming a useful part of the A Little Big World workflow.
There are locations that appear again and again in our stories. Farmyards, fences, sheds, paths and other familiar places gradually become part of the world the characters live in.
Being able to keep simple 3D versions of those environments gives us another way to make each new illustration connect with the ones that came before it.
Blender won’t replace the other parts of the process.
It is simply another tool behind the scenes — and one I’m very glad to have picked up again.
Pickle and the Smallest Shadow is coming soon, and we’ll be sharing more from the story as it gets closer.
For now, here’s a glimpse at some of the scaffolding behind the finished page — before Pickle gets all of her feathers back.
A Little Big World is still free to download on the App Store and Google Play.
Explore more A Little Big World stories in the app.
A Little Big World is a growing library of short, meaningful children’s stories designed for ages 2–7.
Each story focuses on emotional growth, social understanding, and gentle life lessons — told in a simple way young children can understand.
We believe small stories can hold big meaning.
