Never for the CCFE / 2024

Billie’s
Carrot Quest.

A little rabbit.
A bigger world.

An illustrated adventure into the food beneath our feet. Made with new tools, a lot of handwork, and a thousand real books.

Step inside the book

Billie the bunny, Teacher Bobbie, Bailey the bear and Babs the badger set off through the countryside, between white picket fences and fields of flowers. — A field trip into a world we made.Scroll to explore

Client: Canadian Centre for
Food & Ecology
Our part: Character design, illustration
& book production
The occasion: Flavour Harvest Festival
Out in the world: 1,000 printed copies

01 The story

Big ideas.
Small readers.

The Canadian Centre for Food & Ecology had a story about a rabbit who wasn’t particularly excited about his carrot. A trip to the carrot patch changes that.

It’s a small adventure with a bigger purpose: helping young children explore how food grows, and the connection between what’s happening in the soil and what ends up on their plate.

The CCFE wrote the book. They brought Never in to give it a world.

A magnifying glass reveals tiny organisms in the soil, beneath a sunny farm filled with carrot rows, birds and butterflies. — Below the surfaceFinished illustration

Make the world
worth being
curious about.

Billie imagines carrot soup, a muffin and a carrot salad floating on little clouds above the countryside. — A little imaginationFinished illustration

02 The cast

First, make
some friends.

Before there could be a book, there had to be characters you’d want to follow. We designed the whole cast, then carried them through a shared world of classrooms, fields, shops and kitchens.

Bailey the bear in blue overalls, Billie the bunny in a yellow T-shirt, and Babs the badger in a green dress, together on a flower-lined country path.

Billie The bunny: A carrot sceptic with a whole adventure ahead of him.
Babs The badger: An apple in her lunchbox. A place beside her friends.
Bailey The bear: Blueberries, blue overalls, and a very good appetite.
Bobbie The teacher: The one who turns an uneaten carrot into a field trip.
Worm The Easter egg: Always around, hiding somewhere in every illustration. See if you can spot him.

03 The craft

New tools.
Human hands.

There’s a lot of work between generating an image and illustrating a book. We used fine-tuned models as part of a process that also involved pencils, hand painting, compositing and traditional page layout.

The tools changed. The need to make a thousand small creative decisions didn’t.

01
Find the characters.
Design the cast: their shapes, clothes, expressions and the things that make each one recognizable.
02
Work it out on paper.
Sketch many of the frames by hand. Decide what the scene needs to say and how the characters belong in it.
03
Build the illustrated world.
Use fine-tuned models to generate visuals within the direction we’d established, across different scenes and settings.
04
Get our hands back in.
Edit, paint and composite by hand. Bring the pieces together into the illustrations the story actually needs.
05
Make it a book.
Lay out the type, compose the pages, work through the spreads and prepare the finished book for print.

Billie, Babs and Bailey arrive at The Sweet Potato, a woodland grocery store surrounded by trees and flowers. — Two finished illustrations. Every detail considered.

Inside the wooden produce shop, Billie, Babs and Bailey explore baskets of fresh fruit and vegetables. — Two finished illustrations. Every detail considered.

The final image is where all
those decisions meet.

04 The book

A story you can
put your hands on.

Start with the cover.
Then see where Billie takes you.

Billie’s Carrot Quest

Open the book

A 25-page picture book, written by the CCFE and illustrated by Never.

Open original PDF

05 Beyond the book

Out of the book.
Into the festival.

Billie didn’t stay between the covers. He was a familiar face all over Flavour Harvest, carrying the book’s playful world into the festival’s posters and advertising.

A rabbit, a burst of carrots, and an invitation to come taste, play and learn. The same character, with a much bigger job to do.