The first book in a three-part series for a UK author. Forty-three pages, hardback, for readers aged four to seven. All three books are drawn and complete, and the series is on pre-order from the author at magnificentmadrassa.com.
Winter darkness wraps around the madrassa like a blanket. The night sky is clear, the moon casts a soft glow through the window, and this is no ordinary madrassa — here every lesson is an adventure.
Imam Idris, who always has a twinkle in his eye, greets his students with a riddle. At night they come without being called. By day they are lost without being stolen. “Stars!” the children shout together. He points upward, and the ceiling melts away into constellations. Then he claps his hands and tells them to close their eyes.
They open them in space suits, floating among the stars. A comet arrives to carry them — and today it is a train across the universe, with Imam Idris at the controls. Ali, Fatima, Layla and Zara ride past a nebula where new stars are born, a red giant at the end of its life, a black hole that swallows a ball thrown into it, and the shimmering river of the Milky Way. They circle Saturn’s rings of ice and rock, watch Jupiter’s storm turning as it has for three hundred years, pass the rust-red deserts of Mars, and come at last to a familiar blue and green sphere.
Then they are back on the floor of the madrassa in their ordinary clothes, full of questions. As the children leave, Imam Idris stands at the window with his telescope. “Allah’s signs are everywhere,” he says to himself.
| Title | Magnificent Madrassa: Stars & Universe |
|---|---|
| Author | Muhammad Akhtar |
| Illustrator | Amna Zaki, The Rainbow Stories — main illustrator, with the studio’s lead illustrator and team rendering under her direction |
| Series | Book one of three. All three are drawn and complete; The Miracle of Water and Mountains as Pegs follow this one |
| Reading age | 4 to 7, and curious early readers |
| Extent | 43 pages, hardback |
| Publisher | Hikmat Publishing, London |
| Where to buy | magnificentmadrassa.com — pre-order |
Every spread was roughed in pencil and approved before any colour was laid down. The cover and two spreads are shown here, each rough beside the page it became.
Drawn by hand in Procreate. Nothing in this book was generated.
All three books in the series are now drawn and complete. Amna Zaki is the main illustrator: the character designs, the direction on every spread and the sign-off on every finished page are hers, with the studio’s lead illustrator and team working on the rendering under that direction. It is how a forty-three-page book, three times over, keeps one look from the first spread to the last — and it is the same way the studio runs a storyboard or a character design job of any size.
Amna Zaki of The Rainbow Stories, a children’s book illustration studio in Lahore, is the main illustrator — the characters, the direction on every spread and the final approval are hers, with the studio’s lead illustrator and team rendering under her direction. The series is written by Muhammad Akhtar.
By deciding what it has to do in the story first. A nebula is a cloud of gas thousands of light years wide, which is not a thing a four-year-old has a reference for, so the spread puts the children on a ridge in the foreground at a readable size and lets the gas cloud take the whole of the facing page. Scale is carried by what you can measure against, not by the object itself. Keeping a cast consistent across books is answered on the Great Barrier Reef case study.
That is welcome and it speeds the work up. This manuscript arrived with notes against almost every page — which characters to include, where to put the sound effects, how big a planet should look. Notes like those are a starting point for the roughs, and anything that will not work on the page is raised at the rough stage rather than after painting.
Yes. This series is built around a madrassa classroom and carries Quranic verses alongside the astronomy. Where a book has religious or cultural content, the author sets what is appropriate and the roughs are the place to check it before anything is finished.
Yes. Nothing about this commission assumed a series. Each book is quoted on its own and signed off on its own, so an author can publish one and stop, or come back years later. What a later book in the same series costs is answered on the Mountains as Pegs case study.
From the author at magnificentmadrassa.com. All three are on pre-order in hardback, as single titles or as the complete series; the author’s own site gives the current delivery estimate.
Two other books are followed the same way here, rough beside printed page: Sage Sails The World and its Great Barrier Reef sequel. All case studies.
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