How We Made 'Is This A Plum?': A Guest Post from Dan & Finn Ojari

Is it a plum? Is it a bum? Whatever it is, it’s so much fun! Filled with clever wordplay and bold art from father-son duo Dan and Finn Ojari, this delightful picture book allows budding readers to learn all about perspective. Die cut pages make this a perfect interactive read to inspire creativity. Read on to learn about how Dan and Finn Ojari created this charming picture book.

Finn and I had the idea for Is this a Plum? while doing crafts one day. We discovered that if you cut a hole in a piece of paper and place it on top of a drawing, something funny happens - it transforms the picture into something else! So, we spent an afternoon playing around with this idea and realized a plum could actually be a hippo’s bum, a spider looks like the nose of a tiger, pears are similar to bears, and so on! We kept thinking and crafting until we had a little homemade book full of these rhyming reveals. The very first book was all drawn by Finn and contained most of the reveals that are in the final book. 

Finn, like all children, is a wonderful artist, and the final artwork in the book is all inspired by his drawings. The illustrations were created using a combination of both our sketches, which we drew with pencils and paper, and finally hand colored them on a computer.  

We hope the book makes you laugh, makes you think, and perhaps makes you question what things really are. It was only after making the book that we noticed it has a subtle, deeper message around investigating what you can see and looking for the truth. After all, the world can be a confusing place for both children and adults, so it’s always best to look a little closer to try and see the full picture.