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. 

How Long Does it Take for a Picture Book to be Published? By Pippa Goodhart

 

This is one of those questions that picture book makers often get asked, and its one where the annoying answer tends to be, ‘It depends.’

 

Back in 1981 when I worked in Heffers Children’s Bookshop in Cambridge I was lucky enough to go on a tour of the Ladybird Book factory in Loughborough. It was an exciting place! Full of noisy machines printing, folding, chopping pages, sticking on covers, then books shooting out onto conveyor belts at speed. But Ladybird didn’t just manufacture the physical books in that building. Upstairs were offices where creators wrote and drew and designed. And they proudly showed their Ladybird book of the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Their wedding was on the 29^th of July. The Ladybird book was created, manufactured, and distributed into shops to be published on August 3^rd. Not a picture book in the sense of a big format twelve-spread kind of picture book, but a book with more pictures than text, created and printed and published in just five days. 

 

Of my own picture books, the one that took the longest from the point of interesting a publisher to arriving in shops was Chapatti Moon. Looking back I see that the editor who published it first showed interest in May 2012, and publication finally happened in September 2017! So that one took more than five years, and that’s not counting the writing of it! But it’s a book I love, with wonderful illustrations by Lizzie Finlay, and it has remained in print and is still selling well, so proved worth the wait. 

 

 

But now I’m going to tell about a new picture book of mine which has taken a much more typical couple of years from publisher interest to being a book for sale in shops, but with very untypical timing of both ends of that process.

I actually made a note of the exact timings of the start of this publication journey because I knew I’d look back and not quite believe it. At 9.30 am on the 2^nd of October 2018 I sent All Sorts to my agent. She read it and sent it to Flying Eye. At 9.45am (really!) she got a response from Sam Arthur saying, ‘I like the new text’. An offer was made by Flying Eye within days, and contracts signed the following month. Emily Rand set to work on illustrations, and publication was set for May 2020. And then we all know what happened. Covid19, lockdown, bookshops shut, and many many book publications delayed. But as things eased in September, All Sorts was published, and I’m delighted with it –

The delayed publication actually meant that the little 'elephant' the book was dedicated to had time to be born before the book was. Here he is at two weeks old, being read his book! -

 

 

So how long does it take for a picture book to get published? It all depends … 

 

Downloadable worksheets worksheets for All Sorts

Showing Off Our New Picture Books!

     Usually on Picture Book Den we don't directly promote our own books. We write blogs about some aspect of picture book writing, publishing or use. But 2020 is an extraordinary year. Publishing has been effected by the Covid 19 pandemic. Most books due to be published from March to August were delayed because shops were closed and warehouses struggling. Book distributor Bertrams went into administration, and a sad number of bookshops have ceased trading.

    But September brought hope. We are seeing a glorious, almost overwhelming, number of new books published all at once. There are over a thousand new titles in the UK this month! Many of those books will get lost in the crowd. So here we are going to wave around and celebrate our own new picture books!

PIPPA GOODHART:

'All Sorts', illustrated by Emily Rand and published by Flying Eye Books, is about how Frankie tries to sort out her world.

Frankie sorts her toys, the foods and clothes, flowers, trees, vehicles, animals, and then tries to sort people. Hardest of all is sorting herself ...

And a happy muddle of life provides the happy ending. After the recent blog on endpapers, I can't resist adding the front and back endpapers for this book, demonstrating some of Frankie's sorting!  ...

'You Choose Fairy Tales', illustrated by Nick Sharratt and published by Puffin, is the latest in the You Choose series of books which offer lots of choices to consider and talk about. This time the book has a shimmery golden cover, in keeping with its fairy tale theme!

Choose what appeals to you on each spread, and you can create a new fairy tale of your own. 

And, again, the endpapers aren't wasted!

CLARE HELEN WELSH:

'Poo! Is that you?' illustrated by Nicola O'Byrne and published by Macmillan Children's Book, is a non-fiction picture book about Lenny the ring-tailed lemur whose sunny, summer snooze is interrupted by something stinky.

Learn about sloths, stink birds and much more in this book, which cleverly interweaves facts throughout. It also contains an information page at the back of the book, with a photo of each animal.

LUCY ROWLAND:

'Wanda's Words Got Stuck'- illustrated by Paula Bowles and published by Nosy Crow.

Wanda the witch is so shy she can't talk at school. No matter how hard she tries, the words simply won't come out. But when another quiet little witch named Flo joins her class, it seems that Wanda's not the only one who gets nervous sometimes. Then disaster strikes at the school-wide magic contest. Will Wanda have the courage to shout out the magic words and save her new friend?

'Rapunzel to the Rescue'- illustrated by Katy Halford and published by Scholastic. 

What if Rapunzel saved the prince? In this terrific twist on a much-loved fairytale, a prince with magical hair is saved by a fiercely independent Rapunzel.

MINI GREY:

 

 'The Book of Not Entirely Useful Advice'-  by AF Harrold and published by Bloomsbury.

 

 160 pages of poems and advice from AF Harrold and illustrated by me...featuring a lot of food, swearing parrots, bears in your cornflakes and the right number of tigers to have at your picnic. (None.)

 

How to avoid escaped giants....

 

an outbreak of tigers at a picnic...

and the perils of shiplofting. Hopefully there's something for everyone here. There's also an absolutely enormous index compiled by AF.

 

Garry Parsons

The Dinosaur That Pooped A Pirate 

By Tom Fletcher and Dougie Poynter, illustrated by Garry Parsons. Puffin.

More nonsense shenanigans from Danny and his friendly 'eat everything' dinosaur as they set sail in search of treasure, but will being swallowed by the jaws of the monstrous whale and the perils of skull island be too much for them?