Kishor Magazine - Cover Illustration

A children's magazine cover has to work for two readers at once - kids who need something visually playful enough to pick up, and parents and educators who care about the idea underneath.

The brief called for a cover that captured a real, current tension in childhood: the pull between screens and the natural, imaginative world of reading and play.

I split a single tree down the middle. One half is green and alive - a child sits beneath it reading, birds move through the branches, small icons of imagination drift around them: a rocket, a paintbrush, stars. The other half is bare and brown - a child sits under it on a phone, surrounded by app icons instead of birds.

Same tree, same hill, two different futures. The metaphor does the explaining on its own, so the cover reads instantly, even to a child glancing at a newsstand.

Published as the cover of Kishor's April 2021 issue by the Maharashtra State Bureau of Textbook Production and Curriculum Research, with credit printed on the magazine's official masthead. This is the only piece in my portfolio verified by a government publisher rather than self-directed or informal work.

Skills demonstrated