Picture Books

I want to share some books with you!

Hello Chums!

I wanted to chat about picture books because I love them. Picture books are often our first introductions to art and storytelling. A lot of us have a favourite one from our childhood. Many of us learned how to read picking out words from the books that were read to us.

Even though they are meant for children I think many adults enjoy them as well. I wanted to share a couple old favourites and new favourites with you. Maybe it will inspire you to go to the library and look at some too.

Old favourites:

Outside Over There - Maurice Sendak

I’ve had my copy of this book as long as I can remember. Its about a girl named Ida whose baby sister is stolen by goblins. They replace her with a baby made of ice that shatters. Ida goes ‘outside over there’ with her wonder horn in her mothers raincoat to save her sister and floats through a dreamy moonlit world. I’ve always loved the pictures and surreal moody atmosphere. Even though it was scary to me as a child I enjoyed it and it always stuck out in my memory.

The Balloon Tree - Phoebe Gillman

The illustrations in this book always made me happy as a child. I really love bright colours and the painting of the rainbow balloons in the tree was always very beautiful to me. There are so many little things happening in all of the artwork and I loved examining all the details as a kid.

New favourites

Hot Dog - Doug Salati

The exhausted feelings of the little dog are so well conveyed in this book. I feel like the sweltering heat of the city is coming out of the pages. I love the sequence with the little dog playing on the beach, the long shadows and the light in the illustrations. So much of the story was told with pictures and I liked how sparingly words were used.

The Skull - Jon Klassen

Jon Klassen said he wrote this based on the memory of a folktale he read. I like the idea of a reinterpretation based on a faded memory that was warped with time. The book is kind of grim and sad but also really funny and sweet. I love the limited colour palette and the use of light and shadows in the artwork. All of Jon Klassen’s childrens books are pretty brilliant.

Further reading and resources I wanted to share:

Jon Klassen and Mac Barnet have a Substack called Looking at Picture Books that I really enjoy. I loved their discussion of Goodnight Moon especially. I haven’t sprung for a paid subscription but they have a number of free articles available.

If you enjoy picture books I highly recommend visiting the Children’s book collections at the Lillian H. Smith Branch of the Toronto Library. They usually have a themed display with art and books from their collection and the librarians are very friendly and happy to share their knowledge. There are lots of books that are reference only but you can look at them there. They even have original artwork they will bring out to share with you. They run three lectures a year with authors and illustrators. If you can’t visit in person they have also have a digital archive.

I mentioned this in my last newsletter but I thought it worth a mention again, if you are interested in drawing for children’s books or doing Illustration in general Illochat is a great podcast to check out. The hosts are illustrators Sunny Duran and Olga Herrera, Olga is also an author. They discuss their work and progress in a really relatable way and sometimes interview guest artists and writers. They seem like really nice people and I always enjoy listening to their episodes.

I also wanted to share a reference book I took out from the library that I found really interesting called Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. It went through how emotions and storytelling can be conveyed through compsition and structural elements of a picture and I think about it a lot.

Anyway thanks for reading, I hope you head to the library to check out some beautiful books! Or if you are looking to buy a book visit your local small business bookseller.