I wrote a children’s picture book.
That Tear On Your Cheek is a picture book for ages 6–17 about growing through
adversity. It’s built as a rhyming dialogue between a child voice and a steadier adult voice, the child asking the kind of questions kids actually ask when they’re hurting, and the adult
answering honestly without making the answer too easy.
It’s meant to live in two places at once: a story you can read with a young kid at bedtime, and a
quieter message that still holds up when that same kid is older and going through something hard.
The characters
Most of the book is two people on the page. The endpaper is the closest thing to a thesis statement:
all the small moments of being a parent and a kid together, sketched out at once.
A spread from the book
Here’s what a typical spread looks like, the child asks if pain is the point, and the
answer pushes back without sugaring it.
How it was made
The illustrations are AI-augmented, I directed a pipeline that took character references and
posed them through specific moments in the book, then refined and recomposed in passes. It’s the same
broader interest in AI-augmented creative work that I write about on
Substack, applied here to a
medium where I needed dozens of consistent illustrations of the same two characters across very different
emotional beats.
Get it
Published May 2026 via Amazon KDP. Hardcover and paperback.