Saturday, February 05, 2011

Children's illustrations

I know I have blogged a bit about this before, but if you end up reading a lot of children's books, you start to get a big appreciation of the artwork involved. Of course I go on a lot about Sarah McIntyre because she is a good friend of mine and happens to be extremely talented! We recently came across Timothy Basil Ering's book Frog Belly Rat Bone in the library and I absolutely love the illustrations. Click to enlarge, it is worth it. The Bean isn't quite old enough for the book yet, so it was for pure pleasure D and I were flicking through this one.

On another note, The Bean loves dinosaurs, so when I saw Tyrannosaurus Drip in the library it immediately went on her wishlist, and she got it for her birthday this year.

It's by Julia Donaldson, who of course wrote The Gruffalo, a book that I don't really rate that much. She has a real genius for the metre of poetry for children's tales and they are a pleasure to read. I much prefer Monkey Puzzle (although the illustrations by Axel Scheffler, who also did The Gruffalo, completely freak me out) or particularly What The Ladybird Heard or Sharing a Shell with great illustrations by Lydia Monks. Tyrannosaurus Drip has illustrations by David Roberts and they are fantastic. His Tyrannosaurus Rex are so wonderfully fierce but dim and the change of colour palate between the goodies and baddies is marvellous.

I've no doubt I will have plenty more to say on this topic, but just wanted to share these gems with you!