The Yuckies is a children’s book series which uses muck, goo and mischief to get kids thinking about how our actions affect the environment and what they can do about it. The series is digital but the creator wanted to retain the look and feel of a picture book, while also making the Yuckies really mucky and disgusting in a tactile, textured way that the digital medium doesn’t always lend itself to. To achieve this, the illustrations are hand-drawn and painted in watercolour, before being scanned and converted to a digital format. Illustrator, Helena Turinski, spent a lot of time making the yucky characters live up to their namesake and settled on using salt to react with the watercolours, creating a crusty ‘yucky’ look. Once the illustrations were converted to a digital format, they were animated and brought to life by app developers, distriqt.

The first two story apps in The Yuckies series are available on the App Store for iPads. They will be released for iPhone later in the year and there are also three more stories in The Yuckies series that are yet to be produced.