So the book was called:
When I Grow Up I Want to Be ...
On the front page I put an image of my nephew so I haven't included that. The book went "When I grow up I want to be a ___ like my ___" In which I filled in the different job titles of each of the people in my family. I am from a family of 6 (+ the Dad) and we all have pretty unique jobs so this worked really well.
Here is an example
Each page was in a different color
And here is the page I had for myself.
My Page
At the end of the book I had a double page spread that included everyone with the caption
"My family sure are amazing"
"but on second thought ..."
And the final page was a cartoon of my nephew with
"when I grow up I want to be ME"
Because I wanted each picture to resemble each person and be of the same style I had to draw them myself. I started by finding an image on the internet for my sister the nurse (as nurses have a lot of cartoons). This gave me a base for the style and proportions of image I was going for.
The image I started with which I do not own
Next I drew the cartoons on paper. This took a couple of attempts for each person but I wasn't to worried because I knew I could clean them up on the computer. I used a black felt to trace the outlines, this allowed me to easily convert the image to a Bitmap (vector based images)
Original of myself
I used a free program called Inkscape which allowed me to convert to a Bitmap and then smooth the lines. From there I manually went round and edited any section which the lines didn't quite meet, weren't straight or out of proportion. Notice I didn't draw any eyes on the image. I realized really quickly that the eyes needed more detail so they were done separately. Again for the eyes I found some similar on the internet and then redrew them.
Next I colored in the images with slight gradients. I found it just looked better.
Finally I used an online book printing service to turn it into a hard cover book. I used Diamond Photo in which all I had to do was upload the images I had made and add the text. All up it cost me $20 NZ (roughly $14.57 US) and about 12 hours of time. I was no expert at inkscape when I started and I don't claim to be but it was easy enough for this project.