I Spy With My Little Eye…… My Own Book Creation!
There’s something in an I Spy book that kids just gravitate towards – the intricate scenes, the hidden treasures, the joy of discovery and yet, the simplicity of it all. Walter Wick’s amazing photos inspired my kids to create their own I Spy books. You must be familiar with these books. If not, I Spy a Christmas Tree is a favorite in our home.
My goal for this project was to encourage my kids to write in rhyme and see intricate details in photos, we made these books for our own personal collection. I wasn’t worried about copyrighting or stealing another author’s or illustrator’s ideas since there are many variations of these kinds of books in the market and we weren’t going to list these for sale. It was simply a legacy project.
Setting the Stage: Crafting Scenes
This is a great first book for families. It doesn’t require much, if any storyline. It doesn’t even need an overall theme. It doesn’t even require you to draw or color illustrations. Your scenes can even be a jumbled mess. Every page can have a different scene and idea too. Sometimes each picture was its own mini story. We scoured our surroundings for fun or quirky objects that would serve as the focal points of our I Spy challenges.
Through the Lens: Capturing Magic
Armed with a camera or phone with a camera app, I would document each scene the kids made and upload them to my shutterfly account. You could also upload them to Canva. (Canva didn’t exist when we made our first I Spy book.)
A Touch of Typography: Crafting Clues
Incorporating text was the final piece of the puzzle. We looked at our pictures on the computer and wrote poems that would encourage the readers to explore and observe. These books are meant to feel interactive, and at the end of the book, we created one scene that invited the reader to become an active participant in the adventure by leaving the words blank and asking them if they could create their own poem for the illustration on the neighboring page.
Bringing It All Together: The Digital Canvas
With our scenes captured and our words written, we formatted the book in Shutterfly. You could more easily use Canva these days. We chose to use a hardcover 8×8 photobook size.
*** Disclaimer, I don’t think there would be any problem actually making a book like this on Amazon KDP and selling it as long as it wasn’t called, I Spy. I’ve seen many other books like I Spy on the platform. But you should double-check just to be sure. We weren’t as familiar with self-publishing at the time we created these so Shutterfly worked great for our needs. We weren’t interested in selling, just creating and using them as keepsake memories. ***
A Work of Heart: The Final Creation
The kids just couldn’t wait to share their final creations with friends. I ended up ordering a few extra book copies to give as gifts for Christmas.