Little Kea is a Hawaii-born children's brand making books, shirts, and cards for keiki ages 2-4. We're a small family operation - AI-first by design, Hawaiian at heart. This post is part of an ongoing series about how we build Little Kea, why we chose to use AI, and what we think it means to raise kids in a world where this technology is just part of life. Learn more about us here.

Most children's books take years. A writer, an illustrator, a publisher, a long chain of people passing something back and forth until it becomes what it's supposed to be.

Ours took one dad, one iPhone, and a lot of late nights with a sleeping baby slung over his shoulder.

When I started building out the imagery for Little Kea's Big Trucks, Rory was small enough that I was the one home with him most of the time. Sade was working. I was figuring out how to be a dad and also how to build something. The two things ended up happening at the same time, in the same chair, in the same quiet house.

I was using Midjourney - early Midjourney, version one and two. Nothing like what it is now. The outputs were basic. Sometimes they were strange. But they were better than what I'd seen before, and I could see where it was going. So I kept going.

The whole book was built in that web app, on my phone, usually with Rory asleep on me. I didn't want him watching me on my phone - I was pretty deliberate about that. So I'd wait. He'd go down. I'd open Midjourney and start working. One arm holding him, one hand typing prompts.

The prompts themselves were a bit absurd, honestly. The one I kept coming back to for the book's visual style was something like: Norman Rockwell and another painter, working together, using watercolor and oil paint at the same time. That sounds ridiculous. But it did something. It pushed the imagery away from the comic book look I was trying to avoid, and toward something warmer, more painterly - more like the Hawaii I was trying to capture. Not a postcard version of it, but a real one. Lived-in. A little worn around the edges in the best possible way.

There were limitations everywhere. I couldn't get consistent angles on characters. I couldn't change a pose without losing the whole look. What you see in the book is partly a creative choice and partly a practical one: we worked with what the technology could do at the time.

And I think that's part of the story. Not a flaw to hide - just the truth of where this technology was, and where it's going. If you're curious about that bigger picture, we wrote more about it in why Little Kea is an AI-first kids brand.

The book exists because of those limitations as much as despite them. Every constraint forced a decision. Every decision is in there somewhere.

Pick up a copy of Little Kea's Big Trucks, or browse the rest of the Little Kea collection.