Freya - Children's book illustration

Written by Lisa Heydlauff

I had the absolute joy of illustrating a series of delightful stories about Freya, a curious little girl and her pattern recognition expeditions for the Outdoor School for Girls curriculum.

The 'Outdoor School for Girls' program equips girls with the skills they need to problem-solve for Climate Change in India by playing football and learning skills outside.

Character Development

Freya is scientific in her approach to problem solving, she is a system-cracker, she notices patterns (pattern recognition) connects the dots in usual scientific and artistic ways from the blue sky to a mobile phone, a loose wire, to a puddle, to birthday cake that comes in a plastic box.

Freya makes connections between things that are disparate, that other people might not see. She takes notes of everything, and in particular plastic everywhere.

Because she is always noticing the blue sky, purple butterfly, piece of plastic floating by, stopping to take notes and draw patterns in her notebook, and she’s always running out of time. She has a backpack made of one-loved-things, in which she carries all of her tools.

She plays football, but she’s always late because she’s looking at the sky, but her team forgives her (teamwork) because she once in a while scores. Freya spends a lot of time alone but she can also be part of a team. While she’s late, she’s late for important reasons, she observes absolutely everything around her.