Colours as a Picture Book Theme, by Pippa Goodhart

 

Colours! 

                  Colours are one of those concepts that young children learn early, along with numbers and opposites and shapes. We adults have a natural instinct to tell and reinforce colour labels in order to teach children these things. I’ve just been sharing books with my one-year-old granddaughter, and observed myself asking her, ‘Where is the blue elephant? Can you see a pink bird?’ even when the text of that book makes no mention of colour. 

    For that teaching reason, colours as a theme are a natural match for a very young audience. But of course they are also visual, and perfect for picture book treatment.

                  Picture books focussing on colour play with colours in different ways. There are those simply naming and showing coloured objects. And there are those which use colour within a story context. I’m going to show two of my favourite examples of colour-based stories, but first of all I want to show off my own new board book, Colours of Things! 

                  My text is a simple rhyming one –

‘Red cherries, a red door, red jam and a parrot.

Orange bunting and T-shirt, marigolds and a carrot.

Yellow banana and crayons, and bright yellow hair.

Green grass, a green dress, green grapes and a pear.’ … And so on through blue, 

purple, pink, brown, silver and gold, to …

‘White mittens, a kitten, a snowman, a cup …

And all sorts of things that just mix colours up!’

 

But its Emily Rand’s gloriously rich array of coloured objects in her illustrations which offer so many everyday examples and so much to notice and talk about. 

 

 

 

                  ‘Wow!’ Said The Owl by Tim Hopgood is a beautiful board book story in which a curious little owl stays awake during the day, and sees colours she hasn’t experienced at night. 

A pink dawn sky, a yellow sun, blue sky, green leaves, red butterflies, grey clouds and rain, all seen from her tree, and all eliciting a ‘Wow!’ reaction. 

 

Then, best of all, …

 

And the night has ‘Wow!’ wonders too. Such a lovely book.

For slightly older readers, and in paperback rather than board book format, is The Colour Monster by Anna Llenas. With wonderful, almost 3D seeming, collage and scribbly oil crayon artwork depicting characterful characters with energy and humour, this is a story that equates colours with moods. 

Colour Monster is very confused, and doesn’t know why, so the capable girl narrator of this story takes him in hand and sorts him out. 

 

He needs to recognise and separate his colour moods. Happiness ‘shines yellow like the sun and twinkles like the stars.’ Sadness is ‘gentle like a blue rainy day’. And so on.

 

Look at fear …

 

All get firmly sorted. But then another colour appears that the fierce know-it-all narrator girl is confused by …

 

Profound, beautiful and funny. A brilliant book. Perfect as a starting point for children to make their own mood colour collages. 

 

                  How else has colour been used in picture books? Do, please, add and share examples in the Comments below.