Pack your bags! A new picture book from Aysha Tengiz takes you on a tour around the world

When Big Picture Press reached out to illustrator Aysha Tengiz, they’d been stopped in their tracks by a mural she’d painted just outside Kings Cross, one of London’s largest train stations. The giant, busy artwork of the local area gave the publisher the brilliant idea to translate it into something much larger: a travel book featuring a bunch of cities from across the world. It’s lucky the illustrators name was emblazoned in massive writing on the mural, making her easy to trace and commission – “this is why it’s so important to get credited!” Aysha says.

With her first picture book already under her wing – Baboo and the Unusual Bee, an explosion of colour and sweet story of a pink bee who befriends a green ladybird – the illustrator took the next publishing challenge in her stride, setting out to draw a tour of 12 cities around the globe: London, Tokyo, Paris, New York, Seoul, Istanbul, Mexico City, Budapest, Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona and Rome.

With so much to possibly pack in, at first the illustrator struggled with the challenge of fitting an entire city in one spread. Looking to Ottoman miniature buildings for inspiration, Aysha decided the solution was to stick to a very flat perspective. “A lack of depth meant that I could pile a lot of details on top of each other,” she says. She also took inspiration from a painting display at The National Portrait Gallery in London, Richard Scarlett’s Sir Henry Unton, which “also plays with scale in a fun way”, Aysha says.

Without as many limits on scale and realistic proportions, Aysha’s playful style came into full swing. The books scenes are jam-packed with buildings small and big – even ones that open up and show you what’s inside – all populated by her joyful illustrated characters. Quite like a page of Where’s Wally?, the more you look at these spreads, the more treasures you’ll find.

For cities on the tour that Aysha had visited, details, characters and colour palettes arrived quite naturally. For those she hadn’t yet been to she made use of Google Maps, taking a virtual wander around the city, collecting facades and distinctive features as she went. YouTube travel vlogs also proved quite useful in the projects research process: “Watching youtubers take me on a day out, trying different foods and exploring different locations helped to give me an idea of the essence and energy of the city,” Aysha says. “But I also wanted the illustrations to be (fairly) accurate and to work as sort of obscure maps.” A combination of these two approaches – energy and accuracy – fed into layouts where everything might be where you can find it in real life, but also unfolds into lots of fun snapshots of city life. Like a glimpse through the windows of a Karaoke bar in the map of Seoul, or performances from mariachi bands in the corner of the pages of Mexico City.

Many of Aysha’s technicolour projects, stories and characters take inspiration from the picture books she loved as a kid, and Big Brilliant World is no exception. Books from Dr Seuss, as well as Helen Nicoll and Jan Pienkowski’s Meg and Mog series and Laurent de Brunhoff’s Babar books, alongside older picture books she’s discovered as an adult by the likes of Tove Jansson, Richard Scarry, Reich Károly have all trickled into her published stories. As a kid that loved finding things in busy illustrations, and the illustrator was set on hiding all four characters that are introduced to the reader at the start of Big Brilliant World throughout the books pages.

“I think picture books are for everyone and the illustrations within them can be richer and more moving than a lot of work you’ll find in prominent galleries,” Aysha shares. A format that rarely gets the credit it deserves, these publications continue to inspire and shape Aysha’s illustration practice. “They offer an escape to other worlds, they inspire, and they teach us new things,” she ends. “It’s still so important to continue creating and reading beautiful books!”

Big Beautiful World is now available to pre-order.