Rita Reis’ Vibrant Illustration for Six Children’s Stories

Rita Reis’s work connects imaginative characters with a practical brief: help young readers notice how everyday life relates to tradition and how they might shape their surroundings. Based in Aveiro, Portugal, the illustrator and sculptor brought that sensibility to 43 illustrations for six children’s stories commissioned by SUSPLACE Sustainable Place Shaping.

The stories form a project titled “Once Upon the Future: Everyday Adventures that Change the World”. Their premise gives the pictures more to do than decorate a page. The illustrations need to invite curiosity, hold a child’s attention and support stories about the links between contemporary life and inherited practices. Reis’s whimsical characters and vibrant colors were identified as a strong fit for that brief.

A sculptor’s eye in an illustration practice

Reis graduated with a degree in Fine Arts-Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto. She continues to develop work across illustration, sculpture and design, and often takes part in individual and collective exhibitions. That mix of disciplines offers useful context for reading her portfolio: her practice isn’t confined to one format, and the work moves between making images, objects and design.

The source describes her illustrations as full of life, with a focus on emotion and fantasy. It also points to an appeal that reaches beyond a narrowly defined age group: the pictures speak to the childlike impulse to look for happiness in an unfamiliar world. For children’s publishing, that emotional register can give a story room to feel playful while still carrying an idea. A character’s presence and a scene’s color can invite a reader into a subject before the text explains it.

The available description doesn’t name specific typefaces, palettes by color, page grids or production software. It does identify two clear visual traits—whimsical characters and vibrant color—and connects them to the project’s aim of sparking curiosity. That’s a helpful distinction for designers working from a brief: visual style matters most when it serves the reader’s experience and the story’s subject, rather than functioning as decoration alone.

Making a multi-story commission cohere

Creating 43 illustrations across six stories means working at a scale where consistency and variation both matter. Each story needs its own scenes and characters, while the collection still has to feel like a shared body of work. Reis’s established visual language gave SUSPLACE a recognizable starting point for that assignment. The commission followed the client’s discovery of her work on the Directory of Illustration website.

For illustrators and art directors, this kind of commission highlights the value of matching the style to the communication task. A lively image can encourage exploration, but a series also asks the artist to keep visual decisions legible from one story to the next. Character design, color and scene making can each carry part of that continuity. The source doesn’t detail Reis’s process or how the 43 images were allocated, so the most grounded takeaway is the fit between her portfolio’s stated qualities and the stories’ stated purpose.

That purpose is specific: the books aim to connect modern life with tradition and empower children to change their surroundings. Those themes give the illustrations a role in framing how readers approach the stories. A playful visual world can make big ideas feel approachable, while recognizable characters offer a point of entry for younger readers. Reis’s emphasis on emotion and fantasy gives the project a way to hold both curiosity and optimism without reducing the stories to a lesson.

See the work

The images below offer a sampling of Reis’s work. Together, they give a visual introduction to the artist whose portfolio led to the SUSPLACE commission. Readers can explore her portfolio through the Directory of Illustration, find more work on Behance, or visit her website. For creative teams, the project is a reminder to assess an illustrator’s wider practice as well as individual images: the strongest match often comes from how an artist’s visual habits support the audience and subject across a whole set of stories.

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