valentin nguyen
information

A Voyage to Virus Land

Children’s Book
Available on Amazon
June 2020 to August 2020

A Voyage to Virus Land is a children’s book that takes you on a trip deep inside the human body to learn about COVID-19.

In the summer of 2020, I collaborated with author and medical student Matt Daly to publish this book so that younger kids can better understand the COVID-19 pandemic. In 3 months, I illustrated and designed 46 pages just in time for kids all over to learn about the global pandemic.


Matt gave me references of how he envisioned the Coronavirus character to look. He provided images of the Grinch and characters from Monsters, Inc., and told me that it has to be a clumsy, gross, awkward, and ugly virus-looking creature.
The protagonist is the tour guide that you follow along with throughout the book. This character directly references the reader as they travel throughout the human body.
The scientist is the narrator who teaches you about all the mask-wearing and hand-washing etiquettes you need to know when living in a pandemic. She helps guide the reader to follow the virus through the human body while educating the protagonist and reader about how the virus affects the body.
The shrink-o-meter express is the machine that shrinks you to microscopic form and blasts off the reader into the human body. Pretty awesome!






I spent anywhere between three days to three weeks illustrating each page. The biggest challenge was making the illustrations within a tight timeline. These two key strategies helped make my process more efficient:

First, I always communicated with the team about where my bandwidth was at every stage of the process. Illustrating uses a lot of energy, and it’s important to take breaks! 

Second, I embraced the practice of sketching freely regardless of how messy my initial drafts were. Embracing imperfections provided the space to discover new techniques and concepts.




last project

forever under construction