The studio behind Aki
Akico Studio began the way most of its books do: with a small girl noticing something everyone else had walked past.
We are an independent publishing studio, founded in 2026, making picture books the slow way — written in the studio, painted by hand, and printed to be kept. Every title starts as a sketchbook of ink drawings long before it becomes a painted world, which is why Aki, our first character, still wanders the margins of everything we make.
We publish only a few books a year. Each one has to survive the studio’s only test: would a four-year-old make you read it twice?
Where the stories come from
Our books grow out of ordinary places — a balcony, a tide pool, a crack in a garden wall — because that is where children actually find their adventures. The job of the illustration is to show the size of what a child feels there.