The Kissing Hand is a children’s novel published in 1993. It was written by Audrey Penn and illustrated by Ruth E. Harper and Nancy M. Leak. The Kissing Hand, addresses separation anxiety in young children and is a great resource at the beginning of the school year, or in any situation where a child must separate from their parents. This book is one that I hold dear to my heart. My mom read this book to me the night before I started kindergarten and today when she comes to visit me in college before getting in the car to return home she kisses my hand and I kiss hers. It is our little way of being with each other until we see one another again.
When given the task to redesign a cover of any book I knew immediately that I wanted to do The Kissing Hand. When redesigning the cover I was careful because I did not want to lose the message behind the book. This children’s story is special to me and I did not want to lose that in the new design. I wanted the cover to express how I feel every time The Kissing Hand.
The original cover was a watercolor by illustrators Ruth E. Harper and Nancy M. Leak. It was an image of a mother raccoon holding her baby raccoon’s hand at night. The back cover was just a night scene with no words, and animals running around. My goal was to update the cover and make it more modern, but knew from the get go that I wanted to stick with the watercolor design of the original cover. I was not sure how I was going to possibly redesign a cover and maintain the significant meaning of the book, but I went to the drawing board and began to sketch.
In beginning sketches I tried a little bit of everything from using only the baby raccoon, to using the baby and the mama raccoon, to not using raccoons at all. There was nothing I did not consider. It was important to me to try a little bit of everything in my sketches because I really wanted to know what was going to make my audience feel something. My overall goal was for my audience to have an emotional connection with The Kissing Hand from just glancing at the cover.
The rough draft of my cover was a watercolored image of a baby raccoon standing in the grass with a heart on his hand and then a baby raccoon sleeping in a tree on the back cover. However, I really felt like there was something missing and it was what I was afraid of when I first chose this book. There was no feeling associated with the cover. There was nothing heartwarming or special about it. There was not way my audience was going to connect with what I had. So I went back to my original sketches to figure out what I could do to make it stronger. When I looked at the majority of my sketches I instantly saw what it was that was missing – the mama raccoon. Not having her actually took away from the cover and once I added the mama I was able to see a heartwarming connection between the mama raccoon and the baby raccoon on the front cover.
The back cover really did not change throughout this process. I knew I wanted a baby sleeping and wanted a heart visible on the baby raccoons hand whenever he was pictured. The overall idea behind my redesign of the front and back covers for The Kissing Hand is that once the mama raccoon kisses her baby’s hand she is with him through the entire day while he is at school, and while he is sleeping at night. This is the personal connection I have with this book and it was really amazing to see it all come together for my audience.
Kaitlin (Haugen) Ritchie 