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Picture therapy

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The curator of this website says:

"While there are other kidlit websites and resources out in the great digital wild, this site is purely for PBs (picture books)—my deepest literary love.

My goal is to create and compile PB-related information that will be of value to writers, illustrators, teachers, librarians, agents, editors, publishers, and publicists who enjoy PBs are much as I do. In many ways, OPB is both a celebration of the picture book community and a curated resource, as well."

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A Good Deed Can Grow
Author: Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
Illustrator: Holly Hatam
7 February 2023
Christy Ottaviano Books
32 pages

Book description from Goodreads: " Discover the ripple effects of doing a good deed in this interactive picture book about the importance of kindness.
A good deed can grow like a seed....
Join a loving community as they work to create a better world. Whether planting a garden or visiting a sick friend, picking up litter or playing music at the senior center, kind actions-no matter how big or small-can spread like a ripple, impacting the lives of others for the better.

Jennifer Chambliss Bertman's inspiring text and Holly Hatam's joyful illustrations celebrate how anyone, young or old, can make a difference. It all starts with a good deed."

Educational Activities inspired by A Good Deed Can Grow:

Before Reading-From looking at the front and back cover:

What does the phrase "good deeds" make you think of?

How might a good deed grow?

What do you notice about the children on the front cover? On the back cover?

What questions would you like to ask the author before you read the book?

After Reading-Now that you've read the story:

Which idea pleased you most-that a good deed could be a seed, a ripple, a sunbeam, or a smile?

Have you ever felt too small to help a problem that seems so big? What could you do about that problem?

How did reading the book change you (or your viewpoint)?

What did you think of the book's ending?

Which picture did you like the most? Why?

Did you enjoy this book? Why/​why not?

Taking Action-Since good deeds can have a positive effect in the lives of others, let's look at what YOU might do. Consider doing any of the following (with an adult partner):

planting a garden

visiting a sick friend

picking up litter

playing music or singing at a senior center

Crafting-I really like the community garden in this book-isn't the art terrific? With that in mind, let's enjoy making our own fun crafts about gardens!

Further Reading-Learn more about by good deeds and kindness from these related books. Which of these have you already read? Which of the others would you want to read first? (Click on any book cover for more information on these titles!)

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A Good Deed Can Grow Author: Jennifer Chambliss Bertman Illustrator: Holly Hatam 7 February 2023 Christy Ottaviano Books 32 pages Book description from Goodreads: " Discover the ripple effects of doing a good deed in this interactive picture book about the importance of kindness. A good deed can grow like a seed....

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Meet An Illustrator
This is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in the processes involved in making art for picturebooks.

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The 25th guest on Meet An Illustrator is Tim Hopgood, whose recently-published board book, Wonderful World Of Colours, I have been enthusing about-it really is a superb board book.

Tim published his first children's book some 15 years ago, having started his career as a graphic designer on i-D and Vogue magazines, before turning freelance and working as an art director in the retail fashion industry.

Tim combines his love of music with his love of drawing in a series of picture books based on classic songs: What a Wonderful World, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, Moon River, and Singing in the Rain which received a starred Kirkus review and was named a Publishers' Association Best Book of 2017.

Last year's Wonderful World of ABC was described by Scottish BookTrust as "a great delight" and selected by the Publishers Association as one of the Best New Children's Books 2020.

Tim has described his illustration process as follows:

Here, in a video made for CLPE, you can watch him describing how he worked on Here Comes Frankie:

If your interest in Tim's work is whetted by the short Q&A below (I see that as the main purpose for this series), simply move on over to the Press And Interviews section of his excellent website.

Prints in various sizes of Tim's work (all Giclée prints expertly printed using archival inks on a fine textured paper) are available from his online shop.

Tim is illustrator for Deborah Underwood's next American title, Loving Kindness, to be published by Henry Holt in October.

Here in the UK we can look forward to seeing Time's illustrations in Love, The Earth by Frances Stickley, to be published by Walker Studio in 2022.
As a child, what were the first illustrations you remember admiring?
At junior school I did a project on the history of fire engines. I included lots of pencil crayon drawings of all the different engines and I remember being very pleased with the end results.
Who/what inspired you when you were young?
My dad. My dad taught 3D design at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. He encouraged me to draw and to look!
Who inspires you today?
If I see something I like, it can be anything, I will spend time thinking about why I like it! Gardens, interiors, furniture, art, ceramics, textiles, a page in a picture book ... working out why you connect with something is an interesting creative process.
Did you study art/illustration?
I studied Graphic Design, specialising in Illustration at Kingston Polytechnic.
What is your favourite artist tool/product?
Probably my Pro Arte WASH brush and some Daler Rowney calligraphy ink.
Where do you buy your art supplies?
Scribblers online for black ink. Ken Bromley Art Supplies online for brushes, crayons and watercolours. Ryman for cheap photocopy paper to draw on and 5B/6B pencils.
What software/apps do you use?
I use an old version of QuarkXpress to construct my layouts. And then Photoshop to tidy up elements and adjust colours.
What was your first commission?
My first commission came when I was still at school-it was to create a series of illustrated scenes for a range of ceramic bowls. How that came about I'm not sure-I think it was through a competition at school, but what I do remember is that I used the money to buy my first hi-fi system.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment I'm working on completing the artwork for a book written by Frances Stickley, called 'Love, The Earth' which will be published next year by Walker Studio.

Twitter or Instagram? Instagram

Coffee or tea? Coffee, coffee, coffee

Dog or cat? Dog

Grape or grain? Grape

Sunrise or sunset? Sunrise

What do you listen to when you are working? I make Spotify playlists to suit my mood. Often when I'm deep in concentration I can listen to the same track over and over again. I wear headphones so as not to disturb anyone else at home.

Where can we follow you on social media?
You can follow me on Instagram @timhopgood Twitter @TimHopgood and on my website www.timhopgood.org

This is a regular weekend feature, publishing every Saturday.

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The 25th guest on Meet An Illustrator is Tim Hopgood, whose recently-published board book, Wonderful World Of Colours, I have been enthusing about-it really is a superb board book. Tim published his first children's book some 15 years ago, having started his career as a graphic designer on i-D and Vogue magazines, before turning freelance and working as an art director in the retail fashion industry.

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A great resource here for understanding pictures in picturebooks

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First, let me apologise for the length of this post. It is definitely a 'dip in' read in which you might want to stop and return to in...

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Anne Booth @librarylady has a wonderful blog. Each week she collates and compiles events, or news items, of significance to children's book lovers.

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Hello and welcome to this week's look at all the latest children's book news. This weekly round up is an attempt to highlight articles, news items and useful information, resources or ideas linked to books for children and young people. It's not possible to include everything but I hope it gives a taste of what is available and is useful to those who read it each week.

What I'm reading...

Six years ago I was lucky enough to receive a proof copy of a debut to review for the Bookbag website in anticipation of its publication in February of the following year. When I read The Dreamsnatcher by Abi Elphinstone I was immediately struck by the distinctive narrative voice and the understanding of the type of story many children love. This month Abi's latest book, Jungledrop, the second in the Unmapped Chronicles, was published and I enjoyed this one just as much as her previous stories. You can read my review to find out why. This week the whole family have shared a new picture book from Tiny Owl, Where's Baby Elephant? by Ali Khodai and we all, aged 3 to 89, have declared this a delight! I will post a review next week but this would be perfect for babies, toddlers and for use in early years settings.

On Wednesday I attended the online reveal of the new School Library Association patrons with no idea what to expect. What a treat it was! The new patrons are Juno Dawson, Sarah McIntyre and Smriti Halls and over an enjoyable hour they talked about what school libraries mean to them and how they hope to help and support them in the future. Thank you so much to the hosts for this presentation, Alison Tarrant and Bev Humphrey, for an entertaining and extremely heartening event. You can read a little more about the new patrons and the appeal announced this week in the news section below.

News, articles and resources...

Join Nikki Gamble and 10 Outstanding Authors for An Audience With ... - this sounds absolutely wonderful. Nikki Gamble of Just Imagine has launched a curated programme of online events celebrating writers and illustrators of exceptional repute. Follow the link for more information and to book your place.

Creating a Community of Reading Teachers - a collaboration between a librarian and a teacher. - this excellent article by Barbara Band on the Great School Libraries website gives the background to the setting up of a Teachers as Readers group and would be helpful to anyone interested in becoming involved in this excellent initiative.

The Greatest Girls in Children's Literature? - interesting and thought provoking blogpost by teacher Freya McLaughlin which has already prompted much online discussion. Thank you to Jon Biddle for making me aware of this.

25 years of His Dark Materials: Philip Pullman on the journey of a lifetime - incredibly it's now twenty five years since we first met Lyra and this fascinating article in the Guardian is an enjoyable and insightful read.

Sarah McIntyre's Teacher Comic Pack! - this is a great generous idea. Sarah McIntyre has created a half hour workshop leading children in making their own comics. There are videos, helpful advice and free worksheets to download all linked to Kevin and the Biscuit Bandit her new book created with Philip Reeve.

CLiPPA Poetry Award Show LIVE - if you missed this award ceremony being shown live last week you watch the recording of the Award show via the link to the Cheltenham Literature Festival website until December 31st:

CILIP Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Shadowers' Choice Awards - The Shadowing Groups chose The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, illustrated by Anshika Khullar as their favourite book from the Carnegie shortlist and The Undefeated illustrated by Kadir Nelson and written by Kwame Alexander was voted the Shadowers' Choice for the Kate Greenaway shortlist. You can find out more about the books and the scheme in this Books for Keeps article.

The 2020 Federation of Children's Book Groups Children's Book Award - I was delighted to see that Tom Palmer had won both the award for Books for More Confident Readers category and the overall Award last Saturday. You can find out more about all the winning books as voted for by the children who read them and watch the award ceremony via the link on the FCBG website above.

Pushkin Children's Round Table October 28th 6.30 - 7.30pm - Pushkin Children's Books are hosting their first ever round table event, six of their children's authors - Ele Fountain, Liz Hyder, Kereen Getten, Susie Bower, H.S. Norup and Ayesha Harruna Attah - talking about all things writing, reading and publishing books for young readers. Chairing them in conversation will be Sarah Odedina, Editor-at-Large of Pushkin Children's Books and editor extraordinaire to these authors. Free but you need to register via the link.

'We can always fight': World Burn Down author Steve Cole on how we can help our planet together - Steve Cole's new book World Burn Down, which I enjoyed very much and reviewed here, was inspired by fires in the Amazon - and now, he's sharing on the Book Trust website how we can all make a difference if we come together.

Writes of Passage, selected and with commentary by Nicolette Jones - Writes of Passage, to be published by Nosy Crow in May 2021, is a stunning and uplifting collection of over 100 pieces of writing - poems, prose, speeches, film, play, and song lyrics, quotations, and more - from Shakespeare to Stephen Hawking; Greta Thunberg to Galileo; and Lin-Manuel Miranda to Martin Luther King, Jr. This definitely sounds like one to put on the wish list for next year.

Desert Island Discs with Baroness Floella Benjamin - this is just lovely. Broadcaster, writer, politician and 'national treasure' Dame Floella shares her choice of music and talks about her life with Lauren Laverne.

Open University Reading for Pleasure Book Chat - Watch & download FREE resources to help children develop a love of reading. Featuring Ben Harris reading One Fox, Rich Charlesworth reading A House That Once Was and Teresa Cremin reading The Same Inside this is a valuable resource for both home and school. This team are also presenting a free webinar, Sharing the pleasure: the role of talk in reading on Tuesday 20th October 8 -9pm. If you're quick you can still book a ticket here.

School Library Association New Patrons and Launch of Fundraiser - the new Patrons, Juno Dawson, Sarah McIntyre and Smriti Halls, have launched a fundraiser to look at the impact of lockdown on school libraries. The good & the bad; every service pivoted, every LMS moved to the cloud, every child left without. Please do read about this initiative and support it if you can. Sarah McIntyre published a fabulous new poster on Friday supporting this fundraiser and it is available to download on her website.

Sainsbury's Children's Book Awards 2020 - the winners of this award were announced on Friday, now in their 11th year the awards aim to encourage parents and carers to spend more time reading with their children.

Also the return of Open University Reading for Pleasure Book Blether! Here's the timetable if you are on Twitter and would like to join in.

Finally, some book reviews that caught my eye this week...

The Tindims of Rubbish Island written by Sally Gardner illustrated by Lydia Corry - Printed in dyslexia-friendly font with pictures on every page and perfect for the reluctant reader aged 5+, the Tindims show keen young ecologists how to help protect our planet for the future. In her review for LoveReading4Kids Andrea Reece says, "Children will love them and their recycled world, and these stories are beautifully accessible and perfectly illustrated by Lydia Corry."

Cherry Moon: Little Poems Big Ideas Mindful of Nature by Zaro Weil ill. Junli Song - the winner of this year's CLiPPA is revived on the Achuka website, "Thought-provoking, sensitive and delightfully original, Cherry Moonposes big questions about life with poems and other small gatherings of word."

Midnight Magic by Michelle Harrison, illustrated by Elissa Elwick - the first in a new series this magical mystery story sounds suitable for newly confident readers or to read aloud as Jo Clarke says: "Effortlessly engaging and entertaining, this is a marvellous start to a new series."

The Ghost of Gosswater by Lucy Strange - I love Lucy Strange's writing style and her latest book combining a Lake District setting, a ghost and a mystery would have been my ideal read as a ten year old. This lovely review by Emma Kuyateh has made me want to read it now and I'm considerably older than ten!

Witch by Finbar Hawkins - this is an outstanding review by Gordon Askew, and I always trust his reviews. He described this novel as his "YA debut of the year" but goes on to say "I have read only a few other novels this year that can stand comparison with the breathtaking quality of this one." Witch has now gone soaring up my to read list and I would urge you to read this review to find out more.

Well, another busy week! I hope some of the links are useful to you. Happy reading.

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Reading Matters - news from the world of children's books

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Hello and welcome to this week's look at all the latest children's book news. This weekly round up is an attempt to highlight articles, news items and useful information, resources or ideas linked to books for children and young people. It's not possible to include everything but I hope it gives a taste of what...

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There are some really great ideas and resources included here. The most recent blog is all about Where the Wild Things Are

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Herts for Learning, Robertson House, Six Hills Way, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, SG1 2FQ.

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This is a really great resource for anyone interested in picturebooks and the development of children's oral language

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Easily Find Great Children's Books for Speech and Language Development

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Find some of the best children's books for speech therapy. All books are compiled by a Speech Pathologist and grouped by language areas, speech sounds, themes and ages.

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Mini Grey's Blogspot

Always an entertaining and informative read

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For someone who is allegedly supposed to be drawing things, I spend an awful lot of time trying to avoid committing my pencil to the page. In today's post I'm going to gaze deep into the abyss of procrastination and pull out a few ideas for fooling yourself into drawing and making things.

Being creative - it's a risky business. It may go wrong. You may toil on something all day then realise it just doesn't work. Time may be lost. You may have to look your idea in the face and then hurl it out of the window. Better to not start at all and avoid all the anguish...

Why your drawing is nearly always a disappointment

When you start a drawing of an idea there's usually a picture in your mind that you are aiming for. But your imagination has a limitless budget; it has the world's best cast and locations and atmospheric lighting and spell-binding special effects. So as you gaze upon your drawn effort you measure it up against the gleaming image in your brain and you find it wanting and inadequate.

But there are so many ways to be wrong and just one elusive way of being right, when you're chasing a particular picture. Comparing can be toxic beause comparing seems to mostly involve noticing what's wrong..

The imaginary picture you are competing with - the feeling of it - is impossible to achieve. Disappointment is inevitable.

BUT....try wandering away from your picture and forgetting about it a bit. Then, a little later, take it by surprise.Stumble upon it unawares. Suddenly, it won't seem so bad. You'll have forgotten that picture in your mind, and rather than failing to be as good as that, your drawing might be surprisingly saying what you wanted it to say.

What do you do if you don't know how to do something? You make a model. You do a test, an experiment. You draw it as a tiny thumbnail. On the scrappiest possible paper.

Recently I have been making pictures for a book of poems by AF Harrold. There are about 128 pages of them (I'm still not sure exactly how many.) I've never done anything with so many pages before. I had print-outs of the words but there was no way I could manage to draw rough ideas at the real size.

The only answer was to massively miniaturise the whole thing so I could see it all at a glance. So I made little 13cm wide pages and then got out the scribbling materials and the pritt stick and scissors. And the good thing is, working teeny is fast. And if a teeny page goes wrong, you can doodle another version in a few seconds. And because it's teeny you are forced to be simple. So if I'm feeling daunted, drawing teeny can really help.

Safety in numbers - how multiples can help

So you've managed to be making a picture but now you splat Quink on it or your cat comes in from the muddy garden and tap-dances on it or everything goes the wrong colour... Now, (in snakes and ladders terms) do you have to slither down to the starting line again? Or do you have a SPARE (evil?) twin coming along at the same time?

Nowadays I quite often print a couple of copies of the drawing for a picture I'm going to do so I can try things out on the evil twin and use the good twin. Or the other way round.

Rules and recipes can set you free

TOO MUCH CHOICE - paralyses you and stops you getting started. So do we need to take away options? Having a Style: is a way of cutting down your options, so there's less time deciding how to do things. It's a bit like wearing a uniform to work- you don't have to spend any time deciding what to wear. Limitations can set you free - by giving you less decisions to have to make.

The blank paper is a terrifying thing, because the possibilities and choices are infinite - so - you've got to help yourself out of the quicksand of infinite possibilities and....

Throw yourself a bone (something to get started with)

Anything can be a start. A shape. A stain. A smudge. Using old scraps of used paper.

Things that are changeable are good, which is why cutting things out and moving them around is my favourite way out of being stuck. Tracing Paper is a very useful secret weapon.

It could be possible to fool yourself into doing your drawing by accident....

How to go running: put on your running kit and before you know it, you'll be going out of the door...

And anyway, the thing you don't draw can be the main event

The power of things you don't draw is huge - because our reading accomplice, Your & My Imagination, supplies all the extras. The horror film is most scary when you haven't properly seen the Thing. Take advantage of the full budget power of the imagination, and hide your Thing.

Words, pictures & our storytelling brains are our accomplices

In the picture book world, we're using pictures and words, so don't forget that words can help you. You don't have to draw it well, if a label can help explain what it is. Stealing is an option, also known as borrowing. Find the thing that's a bit like the thing you're after. Something old, something new, something shoplifted. Random things are useful. Given a set of random images, we sequence them automatically into some sort of bizarre narrative, we can't help constructing stories.

Édouard Manet's Illusion of Effortlessness and the Iceberg of Hard Work

In his last years Édouard Manet wrote adorable letters decorated with beautifully dashed off watercolour sketches of delightful things - peaches and cats and ankles and watering cans and gardens and the lovely snail shown above. But he dashed them off on thin paper, and I think this may be key.

In the letter above there's a charming liquidly drawn happy cat.

But have a look at this letter here:

There's a really similar almost matching cat appearing in Manet's assortment of decorations.

And it is possible to trace the motifs in his letters back to little studies in his sketchbooks.

Above there's a sketchbook study of some nice ankles. And you can spot them adorning the letter below:

The sketch and the letter exactly match in size. So Manet would work out his picture in advance - in fact have a repertoir of motifs to draw from again and again - and then trace it into his letter straight off with a brush - so it looked like it fell effortlessly, sponaneously - onto the page - with no struggle or mishap. And maybe Manet wanted the receivers of his fresh and beautiful letters to feel they'd happened immediately and spontaneously - but what he was creating was an illusion.

When you see a published picture book, you are looking at an iceberg, and lots of it you cannot see. With the iceberg 80% is invisible and lurking below the water's surface. Hiding there are all the other things it has been and the work that was wrong, the many versions in drawers that didn't work, the ideas that had to be cut or abandoned, the rethinking and sweat and struggle. Just as in a magic trick, we don't see all the practice that went into making it look effortless. So sometimes it seems obvious to assume it was easy and effortless to make - which means that if you're struggling, that is unusual and it is because you are not somehow talented enough. But you are being sold an illusion.

What's a drawing for anyway?

Drawing is a way of finding out, a way of discovering: you draw to explore. The process of exploring might be more important than the thing you make. So as school visit time rolls around it could be good to model to children the surprisingness and unexpectedness of the process of making a drawing.

What if there was...A World where Nothing Went Wrong

Things going wrong is an excellent opportunity to find things out. In a world where nothing went wrong there'd be no progress and no evolution. So every mishap, every slip-up, every disaster is an opportunity to find something out.

In the words of Roman Krznaric: "Everything's an offer" - accept the offer and see where it takes you.

And lastly, here is your seven step guide to:

And that's it! Do you have a favourite way to not draw things or get yourself unstuck? Do let me know!

Quite a few images in this post are from artwork for Not Entirely Useful Advice by AF Harrold & Mini Grey, due to be published by Bloomsbury.

Mini's latest publication is the pictures for Money Go Round, by Roger McGough, published by Walker Books.

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For someone who is allegedly supposed to be drawing things, I spend an awful lot of time trying to avoid committing my pencil to the page. In today's post I'm going to gaze deep into the abyss of procrastination and pull out a few ideas for fooling yourself into drawing and making things.

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A fascinating set of resources from the British Library

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Here is @PerryNodelman's website

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Children's Literature Critic and Author of Books for Children

Recent Publications
"My Chinese Words."Part 1, July 2, 2019, Part 2, July 9, 2019, Part 3, July 16, 2019. ChLA international Committee Blog "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish: Some Words about Picturebooks." Children's Literature at the University of Cambridge: A Postgraduate Perspective. "Touching Art: The Art Museum as a Picture Book, and the Picture Book as Art." Journal of Literary Education 1 (2018). 6-25. "The Young Know Everything: Oscar Wilde's Fairy Tales as Children's Literature." Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Alternating Narratives in Fiction for Young Readers: Twice Upon a Time More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picturebooks and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People

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Children's Literature Critic and Author of Books for Children Recent Publications "My Chinese Words."Part 1, July 2, 2019, Part 2, July 9, 2019, Part 3, July 16, 2019. ChLA international Committee Blog "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish: Some Words about Picturebooks." Children's Literature at the University of Cambridge: A Postgraduate Perspective.

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A lovely treat from Perry Nodelman - an extra section on his website all about how pictures communicate

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Ideas about What Pictures Are For

Pictures attract attention. Art historian E. H. Gombrich says, "The visual image is supreme in its capacity for arousal." If an otherwise bare wall has a picture hanging on it, you're more likely to look at the picture than at other parts of the wall-and to look at it expecting to find some sort of meaning in it.

Pictures express the assumptions of the culture they emerge from about what pictures are for-the idea that some pictures are primarily functional (signs representing genders on a toilet door) while others, like paintings in a gallery, are meant to give pleasure or, sometimes, to engender admiration or awe at their reputation or their commercial value); or that some pictures are primarily representational (passport photos) while others are meant to have aesthetic aspects or convey more than just physical appearance (photographic portraits in galleries; or that some visual representations (like exploded views of buildings that show the layout of the rooms, or like abstract paintings in art galleries) represent aspects of objects other than what we might see in looking at them.

Even representational images are most meaningful in the context of a kind of language of learned codes and make little sense to anyone without a previous knowledge of the codes. E. H. Gombrich says, "Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase the 'language of art' is more than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata" (87). Pictures relate to, make use of, and are expressions of all the ways their artists and viewers think about themselves and the world.

There are also codes specific to the visible world of pictures . As Arthur Danto says, "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry-an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld." Art exists in, refers to, and comments on the art its authors is aware of.

Format

The shapes and sizes of pictures affect what might be depicted in them, how it might be depicted (e.g., larger canvases allow for larger patches of colour), and how we understand what they mean).

Also, then, sculpture allows for different ways of understanding what they depict than two-dimensional images do-as do videos, tapestries, etc.

The shape of a canvas might help to determine content, or vice versa; landscapes tend to wider than they are high, unlike portraits-and if they contain people, we are invited to think of how the setting affects the life of the people in it or about the interrelationships of the various people it includes-topics unlikely for a narrower image focused on one person to explore.

Formatting choices such as the width and colour of borders around pictures and even the style of their frames can influence how we understand what a picture depicts. Wide borders might suggest constraint or distance, the absence of borders (or frames) a refusal to be constrained.

Mood: Predominating Characteristics

A series of choices of media, predominating hues, various intensities of colour, kinds of lines and shapes, etc., come together to provide a [picture with a specific moodor atmosphere.

The predominating hues of a picture convey the conventional meanings of those colours. Viewers might see pictures in which greens predominate as restful because many people associate green with peaceful forests, or as unsettling because they associate green with decay or being ill. Some hues have conventional associations with emotions that have no actual relationship to them: because of a traditional association with the Virgin Mary, predominating blues might suggest serenity, or, because of the kind of music called "the blues," suggest sadness.

Shades, the relative brightness or darkness of hues, might also add meaning. People tend to identify darker shades with gloomier subjects, lighter ones with happier subjects. Sometimes, a choice of hues might suggest surprising meanings by contradicting the apparent meaning of what is being depicted-for instance, a somber-hued depiction of a supposedly happy day at the beach.

Saturation, the relative intensity of colours. i.e., the degree to which they have been mixed with white, also conveys meanings. More saturated colors seem more vibrant, less saturated ones more gentle. They then suggest attitudes toward the subject of the picture.

Pictures can also convey meaning by avoiding predominating effects. While subtle blends of related hues or shades may express peace or calm, patches of unrelated colors in shocking combinations convey energy and excitement.

In part because of their relative lack of vibrancy, in part because if thier traditional use in old newspaper photographs and documentary films, pictures in black and white tend to imply seriousness and authenticity.

Predominating shapes and lines: rounded shapes are associated with softness and yielding, angular ones with rigidity and orderliness. Viewers tend to see uncompleted lines as unstable and energetic, while lines that enclose space seem more stable and restful. When one of these possibilities predominates, there's a strong effect on the mood of a picture.

Media

1. Gombrich says, "The image cannot give us more information than the medium can carry." Block prints can reveal texture only with difficulty. Collage inhibits the creation of depth. Watercolor in its translucency creates the impression of light more readily than tempera does. Media choices thus affect mood and meaning.

2. Many media are associated with specific ideas or emotions. Viewers tend to see woodcuts as simple and folk-like, oil paintings as richly elegant, photographs are accurate depictions of reality.

Style

1. Style, the effect of all the aspects of a work considered together, develops from all the various choices an artist makes about both subject and means of presentation.

2. The styles of a picture can communicate meanings by drawing upon stylistic conventions that already have connotations. We expect pictures in the style of cartooning-exaggerated caricatures-to be funny, more representational pictures to be more serious.

3. Some examples of stylistic meanings: Surrealism depicts unrealistic situations in a highly representational way that makes the impossible seem strangely possible and suggests the unstable nature of what we usually consider to be reality.

4. Impressionism tends to connote dreaminess and romanticism.

5. National Styles carry connotation also, and reference to them might evoke the places of their origin and or conventional assumptions about those places or cultures.

6. Artists can deliberately or unconsciouslyevoke the styles of particular artists as a response to or commentary on their own subjects-show the absurdity of a situation by making use of the style of Dali, echo the pose of Botticelli's Venus, etc.

The Meanings of Visual Objects

While overall qualities like design and style help convey the mood and meaning of a story, most of the information that pictures provide comes from the specific figures and objects they depict. These figures become meaningful through the contexts they evoke, which allow viewers to relate them to their knowledge and experience of life, literature, and visual art. Once we identify an object in a painting as, say, a chair, it can evoke all of our associations with chairs, their uses, their history, our own memories of them, etc. In abstract art, circular shapes evoke and thus draw on our associations with circular objects in reality.

Visual objects in pictures can develop weight, ie., attract attention, through an artist's use of symbolism and codes.

Visual symbolism is the use of physical objects to represent abstract ideas. Cross shapes evoke Christian ideas for those aware of the significance of the cross in Christianity. Objects as various as apples, black cats, holly, spiders, bats, water, clouds, eyes, towers etc., etc. have specific meanings in various cultural contexts.

Both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysts suggest that specific visual images have a deeper unconscious content. It's not difficult to find dark Jungian shadows or pointed Freudian phallic objects in pictures. Not all Freudian imagery is so obvious, and the surprise of finding subtle implications in surprising ways in pictures can be a source of pleasure (or discomfort) as well as enriched meaning.

Some of the more obvious narrative implications of pictures depend not on specific symbols but on basic cultural codes-signs that stand for other meanings (like red lights on highways or the symbol P to stand for a particular sound in what we read) that have no resemblance to what they stand for and that people tend to take for granted. Depictions of these codes evoke their conventional meanings.

More generally, we tend to identify dark with evil and light with goodness, associate peace and joy with green spaces, and depression with empty, boxlike spaces.

We interpret the gestures and postures of characters in terms of cultural codes--understand the meanings of hands being shaked or hands waving goodbye, or knowing that upturned heads mean happiness, slumped heads despair.

There are also assumptions about the connections between physical appearance and character or emotions. Certain appearances project evil or goodness, slyness or stupidity, fear or anger, etc.

Pictorial Dynamics

Meanings also emerge from the relationships that the various objects in pictures have with each other. There are two possible forms of relationships: those between objects on the two-dimensional plane of the picture's surface, and those between objects in the three-dimensional space the picture implies.

Square shapes are rigid, round ones accommodating. So characters placed inside constricting boxes seem oppressed, and rounded shapes don't.

Some shapes can also direct attention to other shapes-; e.g. arrow-like shapes might point to the main focus of the picture.

Larger figures tend to have more weight than smaller ones-draw more attention-and we tend to focus on them first. But other qualities can give smaller objects more importance-e.g, if one single human in a picture is surrounded by many similar trees, it stands out and seems more important.

So, sometimes, does one tree surrounded by people. But the mere presence of a human figure amongst other objects gives it weight. People tend to consider people more important than other things.

The size of characters in relation to their background may imply relationships between character and environment. Characters depicted as small shapes surrounded by forests or large empty rooms seem threatened or lost. If the figure of a character were enlarged so that it filled the space, the same figure would seem much less bleak.

The location of an object in a picture can give it more or less emphasis. A figure at the center of a picture tends to have more weight than those on the sides. If artists wish to attract attention to figures other than those in the center, they must do so by making use of one or more of the other techniques outlined here.

The layout of the objects in a picture in relation to one another implies invisible shapes: circles, rectangles, squares, or triangles that form the picture's composition. Since these patterns create order and balance, a disruption of them implies disorder.

Objects in a field of other objects stand out less than isolated ones, and figures sharply isolated from their background stand out more than those that blend in. Sometimes, artists might emphasize specific figures by depicting them against relatively empty backgrounds or by providing them withheavier outlines that separate them from the background.

Probably because viewers have learned to expect heavier objects to sink, the bottom of a picture usually suggests more weight than the top. Thus, artists can make meaningful advantage out of the discomfort viewers tend to feel when heavier figures or more action appears in the tophalf of a picture.

Pictorial perception tends to follow the direction of a viewer's main language-so English speakers tend to read or make sense of pictures as if they move from left to right.

Mercedes Gaffron suggests that pictures contain a glance curve-that viewers look at the figures on the lower left first, and then move their eyes in a curve to the upper right. Because viewers often understand the first figure as most central, the main characters in many narrative pictures appear on the lower left, and the characters they struggle with on the upper right.

As with the overall effects of predominating colors, the colors of specific objects provide information about those objects. The mere fact that objects are in colors that stand out gives them weight. Viewers tend to focus on one white object in a field of otherwise somber colors, or on bright objects in a darker space.

Artist can also imply relationships between objects of the same or similar colors.

Pictures that represent a three-dimension space that appears to exist behind their surface on the other side of the surface of the paper imply relationships within the implied space. The diagonal lines that create the sense of depth in perspective drawing act like arrows focusing attention on the objects they lead toward and allow artists to give greater visual weight to small figures.

Viewers understand events differently when they see them from different points of view. Characters who are seen from below look large and isolated from their backgrounds-against empty skies or ceilings-and seem to be alone and in control of their situations. But characters we look down on from above might seem trapped by their backgrounds or comfortably secure in them.

As in movies, variation in focus also affects the way viewers respond to a scene. Long shots,which show characters surrounded by environment, emphasize the figures' relationship with places and other people, their social situation. Close-ups of character's faces tend to make viewers focus on private feelings. Middle-distance shots,showing objects or characters within but not dwarfed by settings, suggest a balance between intimacy and distance.

In perspective drawings, the spaces that depictions of objects occupy on the page interfere with or overlap each other. Artists can use overlapping to suggest the relationships of the objects they depict, implying that one object or figure dominates or has a close relationship to another; and conversely, lack of overlapping implies a lack of relationship.

The light implied by pictures may come from sources both inside and outside the pictures. An actual light source depicted in a picture draws attention both to itself and to what it casts light on. An implied light from the rear of a picture places characters in front of it in shadow. and might make then seem troubled or evil; an implied light lighting up a character's face or the front surface of or object might suggest importance or happiness. Viewers expect light to fall from above, and therefore variations from this convention create an atmosphere of strange mystery.

The characters in pictures often form what stage directors call stage pictures: they are "blocked"-that is, given positions in relation to each other that imply their social or emotional relationships. Viewers' consciously or unconsciously assume that the characters' positions and gestures do in fact convey information about the events they are taking part in and their responses to it-just as good staging does in the theater.

A picture is fixed and traditionally, can show only one moment separated from the flow of time. Several conventions allow artist to suggest movement.

An artist can suggest activity by choosing to depict a moment when an action isn't complete; an incomplete action invites viewers to imagine its completion. For instance, walking involves moments when the feet are on the floor and moments when they are off it; but since feet on the floor seem to be at rest, an artist wishing to depict a character walking would have to show one foot off the ground. (Consider the waling figure in Alex Coville's Atlantic Limited.)

Viewers tend to complete the lines in pictures by imagining them to extend beyond their depicted length. Linear continuance can be used to suggest that an object is continuing to move on the path existing shapes and lines imply.

The action lines used by cartoonists create a similar effect. By echoing the line of an arm or a foot three or four times, these lines invite viewers to fill the space in between and imagine a continuous movement. Likewise, many lines radiating out from a central point imply explosive activity.

Certain forms of distortion-enlarged hands or feet, bullet-shaped heads-also suggest movement forward or backward, etc.

If people tend to look at pictures from left to right, then tend to assume that time passes from left to right-that what happens on the left of a picture happens before what happens on the right. As a result, we conventionally assume that characters and objects might be in motion when they point toward the right and tend to feel uncomfortable and assume that the motion is difficult or impeded when they face toward the left (consider the train in Covilles Atlantic Limited.) The reverse might be true in say, paintings by speakers of Hebrew.)

Some pictures make use of what Joseph Schwarcz calls continuous narrative; they show the same character or object in a number of different poses within the same picture, each pose representing one moment out of a series of connected actions, moving in time from left to right. (Cubist pictures seem to be operating in this way.)

The most obvious way in which pictures can convey the passage of time is simply by counting on viewers' knowledge that they are meant to show part of a story. When viewers understand that, they tend to explore the picture for information about what it doesn't actually show-they consider what might have happened to lead up to the situation and what might be the result of it.

In depicting human interactions (or even the interactions of abstract shapes) artists must choose which moment to show out of the many possible ones that make up an action. As well as implying what happens before and after them, the specific moments chosen takes on particular significance and strongly influences the way the events actions implied are understood.

Context

Pictures become meaningful not just in terms of what they depict or how they depict it, but also in terms of the contexts we understand them to relate to and be part of. Those contexts can include:

The didactic labels attached to them.

Their position in relationship to each other in a room in a gallery;

Their relationship to the name of the exhibit they appear in.

A viewers' knowledgeof the artist's career, of art history, of the implications of various kinds and schools and movements in art and of other specific works a picture might be responding to or have another relationship with. Knowledge of any or all of these contexts might draw viewers' attention to specific details of pictures and cause them to interpret the details in specific ways.

An equally significant context consists of the ideas, the tastes, and the personality that a specific viewer brings to a picture and interprets it with. Responses to pictures and interpretations of them emerge from the interactions of a picture's contexts and a viewer's contexts.

You can download a PDF version of this list:

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Some of the Ways in Which Pictures Communicate

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(based on the chapter about looking at picture books in my book The Pleasures of Children's Literature) Ideas about What Pictures Are For Pictures attract attention. Art historian E. H. Gombrich says, "The visual image is supreme in its capacity for arousal." If an otherwise bare wall has a picture hanging on it, you're more likely to...

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A veritable treasure trove of references and insights about picturebook makers.

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Welcome to the Picturebook Makers blog - where the world's finest picturebook artists take you behind the scenes.

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Jill Bennett has created a wonderful resource here

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Red Reading Hub - Jillrbennett's Reviews of Children's Books

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I work with Early Years children and act as a consultant for Early Years Education, literature and literacy and occasionally RE. With an MA in Education, particular interest in picture books, poetry and books with a 'spiritual' dimension, I have spent all my career furthering the role of literature as a vehicle for literary (and literacy) development and am the author of Learning to Read with Picture Books.

Over the past few years I have become very concerned with the narrowly conceived, prescriptive views of literature being promoted to teachers and hence, to children. This present pre-occupation in far too many schools, with a largely functional approach to literacy and emphasis on the mechanistic 'bit-parts' aspects, means that it is all too easy for the unique and fundamental role of literature in developing the imagination and in children's meaning making, to be overlooked.

Essentially I see story as a kind of 'sacred space' - a place from which to become aware, to contact the spirit - that essential spark within. However, for literature to play that role in education of the imagination, it must take centre stage in the curriculum and be viewed, not primarily as a way of doing, but rather, as a way of being, or of helping children to be and to become.

In these pages, I hope to be able to highlight books , both those recently published as well as ones that have been well and truly tried and tested, that 'work' with children either at home, playgroups, nurseries or schools. In some instances, there will be ideas for working with the books

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I work with Early Years children and act as a consultant for Early Years Education, literature and literacy and occasionally RE. With an MA in Education, particular interest in picture books, poetry and books with a 'spiritual' dimension, I have spent all my career furthering the role of literature as a vehicle for literary (and...

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Creative Planning with Whole Texts by Sue McGonigle

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Creative Planning with Whole Texts by Sue McGonigle

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A very useful little book for teachers

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Children's literature deserves a central role in the Primary curriculum and has huge potential as a context for a wide range of...

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DIORAMAS and 3D ILLUSTRATION IN PICTUREBOOKS

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DIORAMAS and 3D ILLUSTRATION IN PICTUREBOOKS

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Check out this interesting blog post by PAEONY LEWIS.

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For centuries, dolls' houses have encouraged children's imaginations and story telling. Toy farmyards, zoos, soldiers and train sets, even Playmobil and Lego, can also be used to create miniature imaginative worlds. Children's television was once full of 3D models: Thomas the Tank, Fireman Sam, Clangers, etc. So I am surprised there aren't more children's fiction picture books that use dioramas and 3D illustration, and I thought I'd investigate.

Traditional illustrations create imaginary worlds, but there is something about a miniature 3D scene that draws me in and makes me smile. I am sure I'm not alone (am I?) and I wonder if some children could relate better to a photographic 3D image as it's so similar to what they see on screens. Or is there a hidden reluctance amongst adults and publishers towards books that look more like television, unless they are already a television series? Alternatively, perhaps most 3D artists/illustrators already work with moving images for the screen, rather than books?

Another explanation for the scarcity of 3D models and dioramas in picture books might be that they are very time consuming to create and require photography and model making or papercraft skills, in addition to illustration. For example, Antje Damm, who has created several lovely diorama picture books, commented online: "I am not a very good photographer, and this was my main problem while creating this book." Whilst Lauren Child used a professional photographer, Polly Borland, for her two delightful 3D diorama books, and the first, The Princess and the Pea, took almost two years to complete, compared to the usual three-six months for her picture books. When it came to her second 3D book, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, this time a set designer was also used, Emily Jenkins. Lauren Child comments on her website: "As much as I enjoyed designing and building sets and styling scenes, I must say I was relieved that this time it wasn't my job."

Whatever the reason for the scarcity of fiction picture books that use 3D dioramas, I thought I'd share some delightful examples. I'll begin with an appealing American one I've only just discovered, that is aimed at younger children: Hank Finds An Egg by Rebecca Dudley (with a name like Hank, I doubt I needed to mention it's American!).

This was Rebecca's first picture book and as an architect she was familiar with working in 3D. It's wordless and the theme of kindness and perseverance shines through the simple-to-follow visual story about a monkey who tries to return an egg to a nest. Rebecca also trained in graphic design, and the uncluttered layout and quiet natural colour palette add to the book. There are many more images on Rebecca's blog.

The same US publisher, Peter Pauper Press Inc, is behind a further 3D book, this time creating 3D paper-cut dioramas. Published in March 2019, I haven't yet seen Little Things by Nick Dyer, illustrated by Kelly Pousette. Years ago, the illustrator was given a book on paper cut and says she became fascinated by the process. She is particularly interested in the shadows and lighting that are possible from photographing the scenes.

The next American 3D book is another I haven't seen, Viva Frida by Mexican-born illustrator Yuyi Morales. There are few words, though perhaps this should be classified loosely as non-fiction as it is about the creativity of artist, Frida Kahlo. This vibrant award-winning book appears to be Yuyi Morales' only book that uses 3D models, as her other books are traditionally illustrated. In this video she talks about how time consuming it was to create a book from models and scenes. Interestingly, like Lauren Child, Yuyi Morales used a photographer for her 3D scenes (Peter O'Shea).

Moving across the ocean to the UK, as mentioned earlier, Children's Laureate, Lauren Child, is behind two gorgeous 3D picture books. In the first, The Princess and the Pea, Lauren Child both wrote and created the scenes, ready to be photographed professionally by Polly Borland. The figures are painted 2D cut-outs and the backdrops are 3D dolls' house furniture or specially commissioned items. Many of the panelled rooms started life as cornflake packets. Not everything is to scale, as happens in a real doll's house, and Lauren Child feels this creates a stranger, more childlike world. In the book, she writes: "I love the paintings of Vermeer, his detail and the way he allows you a glimpse into someone else's world." This, and her passion for dolls' houses and use of collage in her books, must all inspire the dioramas in Lauren's quirky retelling of The Princess and the Pea.

When Lauren Child and Polly Borland partnered again on their second 3D book, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, they decided to use dolls and teddy bears because Polly Borland's favourite book as a child was the American photographic picture book, The Lonely Doll by Dare Wright.Since it's publication in 1957, it has caused controversy because of the bear's worrying penchant for smacking, but it remains an iconic book and he published many others using the same realistic photographic 3D techniques.

Again, Lauren Child twisted the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bear s, but this time she didn't personally produce the time-consuming hand-built sets, and instead passed this to Emily Jenkins. Polly Borland remained the photographer. The three bears and Goldilocks were created by doll-maker, John Wright, and Goldilocks stands 30cm tall. Personally, I adore studying the fantastical, intricate photographic 3D illustrations.

Another illustrator I really enjoy who produces dioramas is the German illustrator, Antje Damm. I've even bought one of her books that hasn't been translated into English, which is slightly daft as I don't read German - here it is (can anyone translate the title for me?!). Looking through a book when you can't read the language reminded me what it must be like to be a child faced with a mass of alien words, trying to create a story from just the images.

Like Rebecca Dudley, Antje Damm also studied architecture and therefore was proficient at visualising in 3D and making models. I first bought Antje Damm's Waiting for Goliath because of the interesting illustrations that were a mixture of stand-up 2D and 3D paper/card models, and the strong colour scheme. It looked different to the other books on the shop shelves.

The Visitor (Gecko Press, 2018) is probably Antje Damm's most well-known book in the UK. Here, all the story takes place in one ground-floor room and it is about loneliness and overcoming fears. Again, the book is in her distinctive 3D style and Antje uses variations in colour and lighting to show the development of the story. For the last scene she took the model outside because Antje wanted the warm light of the sun and enjoys experimenting.

Variations in lighting played a major role for another illustrator, Elly MacKay, when she created the diorama images for Maya. Canadian illustrator, Elly Mackay, worked with Indian-born author, Mahak Jain, to create a book that combines reality with the fantastical and a dreamworld. This wasn't Elly's first paper-cut, 3D book, but she said it proved the most challenging. Online, we are told she creates the illustrations by inking synthetic YUPO paper and cutting it into layers that are set up like a Victorian paper theatre, and then she plays with lights and filters to create atmosphere and photographs the scenes. There's a video here on the making of the book, including collaboration between the author and illustrator, which isn't often allowed to happen in publishing.

The images above from the pages of Maya show how Elly MacKay utilised lighting and different techniques. She says the dreamworld uses only black and white, with shadows and fluid, dreamy lines and otherworldly lighting. The real world is crisper, rigid and clearly three-dimensional.

There's more on the creation of Elly's award-winning 3D paper cut diorama books at her website. The image below is from her 2018 book Red Sky at Night, and shows the photography of a scene within one of her 'theatres'.

As I've been putting this blog post together, apart from appreciating how staggeringly time consuming the books are to create, I've come to realise how integral photography and lighting are to the images. Some illustrators use professional photographers, and others learn as they develop their skills. All the illustrators here say they use minimal post-production digital computer manipulation, if at all, and Rebecca Dudley says it might only be to remove a pin holding up a model.

Lauren Child deliberately mixes the sizes of objects, as you'd find in a doll's house, and not reality. I enjoy this as, for example in the delightfully quirky The Princess and the Pea, the juxtaposition of 2D paper figures and 3D miniature objects makes it clear this is an imaginary world. From a positive point of view, Antje Damm's dioramas are also clearly not real, which I like. For me, sterile perfection and seamless minaturisation would detract from the make believe of the storybook world because it leaves less psychological space for the reader's own imagination. Thus perversely, intricate perfection would be more unreal (maybe others disagree?).

Part of the charm of dioramas, whether paper-cut or models, is to feel you are stepping inside a world/theatre of the imagination, not reality. It's like discovering a fairy door on a tree in a wood. You know it's not real but your imagination takes you on a journey of joyous make believe. Now I want to create a 3D story about one of those doors, and where it leads!

Paeony Lewis
Please click for more of my blog posts at the Picture Book Den

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Dioramas and 3D illustration in children's picture books, by Paeony Lewis

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For centuries, dolls' houses have encouraged children's imaginations and story telling. Toy farmyards, zoos, soldiers and train sets, even Playmobil and Lego, can also be used to create miniature imaginative worlds. Children's television was once full of 3D models: Thomas the Tank, Fireman Sam, Clangers, etc.

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Books to promote intercultural and ecological awareness

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One More Page is a podcast for lovers of kids' books. Whether you're a kid, a librarian or just one of those people who never grew up...this is the podcast for you. Packed full of interviews, book reviews and industry gossip, not to mention the occasional fart joke, One More Page is your fortnightly foray into the world of children's books.

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Lots of podcasts from Oz about picturebooks makers and from the world of children's books

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One More Page is a podcast for lovers of kids' books. Whether you're a kid, a librarian or just one of those people who never grew up...this is the podcast for you. Packed full of interviews, book reviews and industry gossip, not to mention the occasional fart joke, One More Page is your fortnightly foray into the world of children's books.

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This is a great website with lots of tips about good picturebooks featuring strong female protagonists.

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The world's largest collection of books and movies for smart, confident, and courageous girls

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This is a wonderful treasure trove for picturebook lovers. Just keep on scrolling and clicking for an amazing amount of picturebook information.

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Case Studies

Australian Picturebooks

Caleb by Gary Crew and Steven Woolman - a Gothic horror story in picturebook form - what?!

Millie by John Marsden and Sally Rippin - one of those little girls who kidlit censors don't like, because she is naughty, and doesn't get punished!

Mr Chicken Goes To Paris by Leigh Hobbs - a great 'scribbly' style of illustration full of movement, and the best of the stories from this author/illustrator imo

Possum Magic by Mem Fox and Julie Vivas - an Australian classic

The Rainbow by Gary Crew and Gregory Rogers - a quiet story illustrated with pastels that feels like it's set in the inner suburbs of an Australian city

Tough Boris by Mem Fox and Kathryn Brown - If you only read the words you'll only get half the story. Look at the pictures closely!

Where Is The Green Sheep? by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek - sometimes simple = popular, and this book is a prime example

Wolf Comes To Town by Denis Manton - an out-of-print book but I can't for the life of me understand why. An excellent example of a catchphrase: "I want it, I like it and I'll take it!"

Pig the Pug by Aaron Blabey - kids love the humour in this book. Compare with its sequel, which isn't quite as well-done.

Harry and Hopper by Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood - a picturebook about the death of a loved dog which avoids falling into the hackneyed trap of replacing the dog with a new one, making everything better

Black Dog by Levi Pinfold - I believe this is an allegory for agoraphobia, though it says something rather disturbing about how to treat strange dogs

Chatterbox by Margaret Wild and Deborah Niland - a great readaloud

The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan - an allegory of white invasion in Australia

Eric by Shaun Tan - a wonderful story full of realistic pencil drawings about a family who hosts an unusual exchange student

The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan - it's been made into an award winning short film, too

Leaf by Stephen Michael King - a story about growing up using a tree as metaphor

The Useless Donkeys by Lydia Pender and Judith Cowell (1979) - The Benjamin Franklin Effect illustrated via a picturebook
British Picturebooks
The Picturebooks Of Chris Van Allsburgh - Allsburgh illustrates in a photorealistic way and makes much use of changing perspectives

Dogger by Shirley Hughes - one of Shirley Hughes's best stories, and we can all learn from the storytelling techniques employed here
Gorilla by Anthony Browne
Postmodern Picturebooks: Anthony Browne - if you'd like to see 'postmodernism' as applied to picturebooks, this is your guy

Guess Who's Coming For Dinner? by John Kelly and Cathy Tincknell - one of my favourite picturebooks which rewards close reading of the illustrations

Hansel and Gretel by Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti - a distinctively dark illustrative style

Wolves by Emily Gravett - metafiction!

Cloud Tea Monkeys and Mysterious Traveler by Mal Peet and Elspeth Graham - a modern story created in retro style

Mog The Forgetful Cat by Judith Kerr - Best-selling picturebooks have become shorter since the Mog series was created, and few illustrators are using coloured pencil in this way

The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr - a great example of the carnavalesque

Snow White as illustrated by Burkert and Hyman - Snow White has been illustrated hundreds of times but rarely in so interesting way as this
The Disgusting Sandwich by Gareth Edwards and Hannah Shaw
Thirteen O'Clock by Enid Blyton and Tom Barling - for its distinctive 1970s style of illustration, despite being an older story than that

Who Wants To Be A Poodle I Don't by lauren child - includes a great example of the leitmotif

Wolves In The Walls - a girl of about 8 or 10 hears wolves in the walls of her house. But these wolves aren't as scary as they might at first appear...

Loveykins by Quentin Blake - Blake's work is better known when he pairs with an equally famous author such as Roald Dahl or David Walliams, but he has also written a number of his own stories. Is he equally good at storycrafting as he is at illustration? Let's see...

The Enormous Crocodile - by Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake. I also quote from a Dahl biographer who delves into why Dahl and Blake paired so successfully.

Stickman by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler - Donaldson is masterful with rhyme and scansion but also a master of taking pieces from well-known tales and blending them into something new. I also think that sometimes Donaldson's books get published even when they're a bit ho-hum - she is an author with a name who can shift copies of anything. But this is one of her best so far.

Where's Spot? by Eric Hill - my daughter loved these books as a toddler (and beyond). Make sure you don't buy the cheap versions of these books as they don't have the flaps, and this series is ALL ABOUT THE FLAPS.

The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjery Williams and William Nicholson - These days the best selling picturebooks are much shorter - more like yarns with a punchline, but this is from the second Golden Age of Children's Literature and does very much feel like it comes from an earlier age. The influence of fairytale is palpable.

A Squash And A Squeeze by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler - an old woman living in the country learns a valuable life lesson with the help of a wise old man.

Jack And The Flumflum Tree by Julia Donaldson and David Roberts - not one of Donaldson's better stories, but nicely illustrated by someone other than Axel Scheffler

Irish Picturebooks

Stuck by Oliver Jeffers - Technically Jeffers would be in his own 'Irish American' category I suppose. Stuck is a great example of what might be described as a 'gag' or 'joke' picture book which are selling really well at the moment. Others in this category are Mo Willems, Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen. Now, I can't personally think of any women writing (nor illustrating) best selling picturebooks of this category. The market is dominated entirely by youngish men. I'd really love to know why this is, but the cynic in me suspects it's not because women aren't funny.

This Moose Belongs To Me by Oliver Jeffers - an absolutely perfect example of John Truby's storytelling steps which, for the record, are: Weakness/Need, Desire, Opponent, Plan, Battle, Self-revelation, New Equilibrium. If teaching story craft to your class, use this book. It requires less time than watching an entire movie.

New Zealand Picturebooks

Scarface Claw by Lynley Dodd - Hairy Maclary is the first and best-known of this series but Scarface Claw is an excellent, relatable villain

Slinky Malinki by Lynley Dodd - Lynley Dodd writes about cats just as well as she writes about dogs.

Nickety Nackety Noo Noo Noo by Joy Cowley and Trace Moroney - Another NZ kidlit great takes inspiration from a Scottish folksong to create this children's tale

Black Dog by Pamela Allen - This doesn't appear to be one of Allen's best selling picture books - others are far more widely known in NZ and Australia, and this is probably because picture books which are metaphors for mental illnesses are niche.

North American Picturebooks

Bears In The Night by Jan and Stan Berenstain - in pressing matters, is Berenst*in spelt with an 'a' or with an 'e'?

Just Me And My Puppy by Mercer Mayer - Mercer Mayer seems to have gotten sick of this series (imho) because the later books are nothing on the earlier ones. They're even more elaborately illustrated. This is one of the earlier ones.
Mercer Mayer on Picturebooks
Rosie's Walk - Use this classic to teach the concept of 'dramatic irony', since there is a big gap between the words and the illustration here, creating an 'ironic distance' between illustration and text.

This Is Not My Hat by John Klassen - a good example of what's popular in picturebooks in the 2010s - stories which are basically gags - but I don't say this in a disparaging way.

Z Is For Moose by Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinsky - a hilarious story, and the best abecedary I have seen. And we thought it was impossible to make a fresh ABC book! This one works far better than its sequel, about shapes. I think I know why - what do you think?

No Roses For Harry! by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham - old books could be uncomfortably femme phobic and this is a good example, but Harry is still a great character.

Harry The Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham - perhaps the most popular of the Harry books. We may have had more if the creators had remained married.

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown - Why is this book such a favourite?

Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak - Soooo much has been written about this influential book. In fact, it's been so influential it hardly even looks special nowadays. Here I take snippets from academics and add a bit to the corpus.

Some Things Are Scary by Florence Parry Heide and Jules Feiffer - a retro picturebook from my own childhood with a surprisingly modern feel.

Olivia by Ian Falconer - a narcissistic little girl in a pig's body. When the English turned her into a cartoon they moved her from NYC to the suburbs, which changes the feel of the series quite a bit.

Olivia and the Missing Toy by Ian Falconer - this plot is a failure but still interesting for its use of a McGuffin

Olivia and the Fairy Princesses by Ian Falconer - is this feminist, or is it just feminist to the casual observer?

Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey - a rare example of a picturebook which breaks 'the rules' of storytelling.

The Dark by Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen - interesting for its art style and use of topology inside a house. The house is fascinating because it's obviously not the boy's real house (there are no parents in the story), but rather a representation of how he psychically feels about home.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle - even a simple story such as this one follows the unwritten rules of storytelling. There's also a healthy eating message.

Duck Cakes For Sale by Janet Lunn and Kim LaFave - a Canadian story from my childhood. I don't think it's very well known or easy to get a hold of now.

The Biggest Sandwich Ever by Rita Golden Gelman and Mort Gerberg - a retro pick from 1980, with a Dr Seussish plot and simple rhyme scheme for emerging readers. A great example of a story that plays with scale.

The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese - although this is an American production, the illustrator did spend some years in China.

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko - one of those obviously feminist picturebooks from the 1980s.

That Is NOT A Good Idea! by Mo Willems - children will love this because they know more than the characters do - dramatic irony! Also overturns a stereotype about weak female characters, which I love.

Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems - an 'early reader' series which has genuine universal appeal due to quite sophisticated humour.

Madeline And The Gypsies by Ludwig Betelmans - I'm going to put this here because Betelmans wrote the Madeline series in English while he lived in America.

Madeline In London by Ludwig Betelmans - another carnivalesque story about the red-headed little orphan

Thidwick The Big-Hearted Moose by Dr Seuss - One of the earliest picturebooks about moose (which may be a bit on trend recently). This is an example of a cumulative tale and the moral is that there are limits to our kindness, in a format which teaches children, overwhelmingly, to be nothing but kind.

And To Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street by Dr Seuss - Geisel's first publication success, with a rhythm inspired by the engine of a steam ship. Interesting for its 'comic reversal' as described by Nodelman.

Doctor De Soto by William Steig - Stieg made much use of Aesop's animal characters and this story is a great example of miniatures in storytelling, literary dreaming and humour. A consideration of the gender roles lets us know how far we've come since 1982.

The Amazing Bone by William Steig - a wonderful example of an ironic Aesopian animal character and a voice which is so strong it makes up for what might be an otherwise uninspiring plot.

Boss Baby by Marla Frazee - the perfect example of humour which appeals equally to children and adults, mostly for different reasons. This is also an ensemble cast, in which both child and parents have their own self-revelation.

Icelandic

Oliver by Birgitta Sif - a boy with stuffed toys as imaginary friends finds a playmate

Translated into English
"International" Picturebooks
The Magical Life Of Mr Renny by Leo Timmers - an attractively illustrated story which seems inspired by the Chinese folktale about the peasant boy whose paintings turned to real life objects after acquisition of a magical brush. What do you think of the ending?

When We Were Alone In The World by Ulf Nilsson and illustrated by Eva Eriksson - even when translated into English, the European distinctiveness shines through

The Story Of The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch - scatological humour at its finest

Anton Can Do Magic by Ole Konnecke - a humorous picturebook for families who would like to teach their children critical thinking skills

Beauty and the Beast by Anne Carter and Binette Schoeder (1986) - Originally a French tale, this version is retold by an English speaker and illustrated by a German.

Which Witch's Wand Works? by Poly Bernatene - a carnivalesque story with an interesting narrative technique

More! by Peter Schossow - an almost wordless picturebook translated from German

By Genre

Fairytales

The Magic Porridge Pot - I look at the Ladybird versions and examine food in children's literature in the context of medieval famines
Hansel and Gretel by Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti
Little Red Riding Hood - This tale fascinates me because it says something so terribly bad about rape, yet bowdlerised versions of this tale abound, and suggest none of that... overtly.

Tom Thumb, Thumbelina And Other Miniature Tales - This post is more about the miniature tales - including mouse tales- than about these fairytales specifically

Beauty and the Beast by Anne Carter and Binette Schoeder (1986) - My favourite version of the story. It includes notes on the history of this tale - which is not technically a fairy tale at all - in the back.

Horror

Picturebooks of the horror genre are excellent examples of what John Truby calls 'the horror flip', which you'll find in the best horror stories.

The best horror stories make use of a unique structural flip. At some point there's a flip between the human and the inhuman. At some point, the monster becomes the hero. This character who we thought was inhuman turns out to be the most humane of all and the human beings turn out to be inhumane, attacking what they don't understand, what is different from themselves. This technique goes back to Frankenstein.

- John Truby

Picturebooks, by their very nature, are designed to comfort. So it is comforting for a child to learn that something they thought was terribly scary is scary only because they are unfamiliar with it.
See: What Is The Horror Genre For? for a breakdown of what horror is and is not.
Wolves by Emily Gravett - a metafictional picturebook in which a wolf in a book seems to come right off the page

The Dark by Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen - a little boy lives in a big scary house with lots of staircases, a dark basement and a mysteriously busted night-light bulb

Bears In The Night by Jan and Stan Berenstain - a night-time expedition to find a mythical beast

Guess Who's Coming For Dinner? by John Kelly and Cathy Tincknell - again we have the gothic house, the scary contraptions, the aristocratic wolf
Caleb by Gary Crew and Steven Woolman
Black Dog by Levi Pinfold - the house in the middle of the snowy forest and the creepy symbolic objects make this a scene from a horror film, not to mention the massive creature peering in through the windows. Did I mention that bit?

Some Things Are Scary by Florence Parry Heide and Jules Feiffer - a mixture of horror symbols and everyday anxieties make for an overall funny and reassuring book

Slinky Malinki by Lynley Dodd - We've got the symbolism of the moon, the nighttime setting, the change of character when darkness falls. This is a great gothic horror for the preschool set.

Beauty and the Beast by Anne Carter and Binette Schoeder (1986) - I'm going to add this one here, too.

Thriller

Rosie's Walk - Is the fox going to catch the hen!?

Scarface Claw by Lynley Dodd - Scarface is a great villain - will the hero win out?

Crime
In a crime story we see what the criminal is up to.
Nickety Nackety Noo Noo Noo by Joy Cowley and Trace Moroney - a kidnapping by an ogre, outwitted by a wishy wee woman

Wolf Comes To Town by Denis Manton - a wolf dresses up as various characters in order to commit various crimes in a town

Detective
In the detective genre, we follow the character who is solving the mystery. Or, the reader is the detective.
Where Is The Green Sheep? by Mem Fox and Judy Horacek - the reader looks for a green sheep somewhere within the book

The Story Of The Little Mole Who Knew It Was None Of His Business by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch - poo mystery

This Is Not My Hat by John Klassen - theft and murder

Where's Spot? by Eric Hill - Finding things is the main job of a detective, no?

Comedy
Z Is For Moose by Kelly Bingham and Paul O. Zelinsky Mr Chicken Goes To Paris by Leigh Hobbs Pig the Pug by Aaron Blabey Elephant and Piggie by Mo Willems
Adventure
This Moose Belongs To Me by Oliver Jeffers Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Family Drama
Who Wants To Be A Poodle I Don't by lauren child Dogger by Shirley Hughes Gorilla by Anthony Browne Harry The Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham No Roses For Harry! by Gene Zion and Margaret Bloy Graham Millie by John Marsden and Sally Rippin Just Me And My Puppy by Mercer Mayer Harry and Hopper by Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood
Self-consciously Feminist Subversions From Thee 1980s

Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole - like a more ridiculous (a.k.a. interesting) ancestor of the Pixar film Brave

Prince Cinders by Babette Cole - inversion doesn't equal subversion, but it's something I guess

Bossyboots by David Cox - An Australian story set in the Wild West (of NSW) in which bossiness is shown to have its distinct advantages

Piggybook by Anthony Browne - written when mothers started entering the workforce in large numbers but were still expected to do everything around the house

The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko - an example of the 'female myth' form which has more recently started to take off.

Illustration Study

Why The Black And White? - Even with colour printing down in cost some illustrators are still working in black and white. Why?

The Glance Curve - how eyes move across a page and how illustrators make the most of that knowledge

Grey - examples of picture books which use grey as their main theme, even though 'kids love primary colours'

Shadow And Lightsource - In all artwork there are various sources of light, each with varying effects. How does it work in picturebooks?

Character Relations In Picturebooks - how characters are introduced visually, a mindmap

Taxonomy of Detail in Character Illustration - words to describe how illustrators draw people

Panoptic Art In Picture Books - artists such as Shirley Hughes usually include a panoptic scene in their picture books. This is probably an aerial, all-seeing view of a setting.

Synoptic Narrative In Picture Books - Continuous narrative is sort of like a comic book sequence but without the framing.

Progressive Narrative In Picture Books - This sort of narrative art is so common in picture books that it hardly needs naming. But if the artist shakes it up a bit they can achieve some very interesting skews.

Thematically Grouped
Picturebooks With Dogs In Some Picturebooks With Bears In For Fans Of Wolves 3 Retro Picturebooks Traditional/Modernist Picturebooks Picturebooks For Older Readers Postmodern Picturebooks An Animal Gets Into Trouble And Out Again In Which Baddies Get Their Comeuppance
Other
Excellent Advice From Shaun Tan The Study Of Film Equals The Study Of Picturebooks First Person Point Of View In Picturebooks And Film Stock Yuck In Picturebooks Nudity In Picturebooks For How Long Have Picturebooks Been Around? The World's First Picturebook Reading Pictures Is A Skill In Its Own Right Naturalistic Animal Behaviour In Picturebooks Talking Animals In Picturebooks Tobacco Use In Picturebooks The Importance of Picturebook Endpapers and Other Peritext Why The Children Don't Like The Picturebook Word Choice In Picturebooks The Size And Format Of Picturebooks Things That Appear In Picturebooks More Than In Real Life Description In Picturebooks Picturebook Titles Concepts and Terminology For Talking About Picturebooks Picturebooks And Music Picturebooks and Age-Appropriateness Auteur Picturebooks Thoughts On The Problems With Boys and Picturebooks The Deep Reading Of Picturebooks What Makes A Picturebook Re-readable? Picturebooks And Why You Should Embrace Them Picturebooks As Mentor Texts Picturebook Endings Metalanguage In Picturebooks Picturebooks Without Pictures Who Are Picturebooks For? Are Picturebooks Being Dumbed Down, Or Are They Just Changing? Beauty Messages In Children's Stories Smile, Baby! You're on the cover of a picturebook. Home Away From Home stories The Carnivalesque in Children's Literature Iterative vs Singular Time In Children's Literature The Two Promises Of Picturebooks
On Picturebook Apps
The Importance Of Onomatopoeia In Picturebook Apps Sharing Picturebooks In The Classroom Attachments To Physical Books Words Academics Are Using To Describe Book Apps Some Limitations Of Studies On Book Apps Text Highlighting Research Text Highlighting In Storybook Apps A Categorisation Of Touch Interactivity And Animation In Storybook Apps Decisions To Make When Storyboarding For Interactivity Chekov's Gun and Interactive Stories

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Teach With Picturebooks - Slap Happy Larry

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Case Studies Australian Picturebooks Caleb by Gary Crew and Steven Woolman - a Gothic horror story in picturebook form - what?! Millie by John Marsden and Sally Rippin - one of those little girls who kidlit censors don't like, because she is naughty, and doesn't get punished!

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Here is a really good site for picturebook enthusiasts

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I love QB. His book 'Clown' is one of my all time favourite picturebooks. You can take a virtual tour of his studio including watching how he draws - with a fountain pen.

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Take a virtual tour of Quentin's studio! Click and drag your mouse on the image to pan around the studio space. To find out more about an item, click on the '+' beside it. Post your comments to Quentin Blake HQ's Facebook page

Do you keep imagery around you to reference in your work?

It's important to me not to have any imagery in the studio. The walls are white. It is my job to imagine whatever it is I am drawing. In the same way, I have only ever drawn from live models during Life Classes when I studied part-time at Chelsea School of Art. Everything I draw now comes from my own imagination.

What is the most unusual object in your studio?

People send me things sometimes, and they can be quite interesting: a group of artists from Australia once sent me a little wooden box full of pictures and items beginning with 'Q'. I have a large ball of pencils (from the Big Draw) which, no matter which way up it lands, will always make a mark; and there is a sheep skull in here somewhere, too. Not to mention a good collection of old-fashioned motor horns, which I include in my books whenever possible.

Peek into the archive ..

I have an archive of over 30,000 drawings: not only finished work, but also all the roughs and many preliminary drawings too. Here are a few early sketches from 'Billy and the Minpins' by Roald Dahl, which I illustrated for the first time in 2017, although the story itself is already over 25 years old! See how Billy develops from rough ideas to finished drawings:

What are you working on at the moment?

I'm working on a new edition of T he King of the Golden River by John Ruskin. The book was first published in 1851, and is not that well-known now though it was very popular at the time. This is the first time I've illustrated it. Unusually, I have begun work slightly differently: instead of doing large roughs to work from, I've made a dummy of the book by sticking the text onto blank pages and drawing my roughs around it. Here are a few examples.

Which pens do you use?

Often I use a lot of scruffy-looking dip pens. Essentially each of these is a straight double-ended holder (a German make called Brausse) with a nib, which is flexible and scratchy, or a J nib, which is harder and broader. Or it may be some other kind of nib, such as a brand called 'Waverley', a favourite of mine, which is a very old-fashioned sort of nib that used to be used a lot by clerks; they are quite hard to come by now, but luckily I laid in a good supply which will last me for years. Or I might use a brush, or a reed pen, or a watercolour pencil, depending on the needs of the job.

The Lightbox

I've been using a lightbox for the past forty years or so. How it works is this: the light shines up through the rough drawing (on fairly thin paper) which I place underneath a blank piece of watercolour paper. I can see the rough shape of the drawing under the paper - but not too clearly. So I don't trace the drawing, but it does help me to know how the picture is composed; and I can retain an air of spontaneity, of 'doing it for the first time' no matter how many goes I have at any particular drawing.

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Take a virtual tour of Quentin's studio! Click and drag your mouse on the image to pan around the studio space. To find out more about an item, click on the '+' beside it. Post your comments to Quentin Blake HQ's Facebook page

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Ireland's Children's Laureate 'Laureate na nÓg' has a wonderful website gallery.

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P. J. Lynch has worked as a Children's Book Illustrator since leaving Brighton College of Art in England in 1984.

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One of Ireland's best known picturebook makers. Check out her books here.
http://www.marielouisefitzpatrick.com/

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Always worth a read. Here's one on picturebooks:

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The young child hearing the words of a picture book being read, and looking at the pictures all the while, 'knows more' than the voice only saying the words! The child 'sees' what the text is not saying. This is great for a child's self-awareness and confidence.

Parents who share hundreds of picture books with their under-5s enable their children to make cognitive leaps through trying to interpret the logic and meanings suggested by the unstated differences between the pictures and the text.

I think it's much more than 'inference'. It's interpretation, cognition, logic, symbolism, holding several ideas in the head at the same time, the germs of abstract thought through analogy etc etc.

Curriculum which narrows responses to books to 'retrieval', 'inference', 'chronology' and 'presentation' cut off the 'interpreting response' which explores logic, cognition, emotion, empathy and ideas.Irony: this disadvantages those who didn't have hundreds of picture books!

Tweeter: "...early reading books must include words which may be hard to decode to keep a child's interest."

(My reply) ...or ideas, mysteries, excitements, tensions, fears, loss, hope, yearnings, wishes, dreams, reveries, boasts, downfalls, musicality...

Let's not get trapped by the word 'vocabulary'. Language is much more than vocab. What helps children is providing processes (books, games, experiments,outings) that are conceptually rich and which encourage leaps of interpretation.

Every time a child tells a story in response to a story they've read or heard, they're selecting a common element from both and creating or affirming a schema. It's the first step in abstract thought. We should aid this and not cut it off with a plethora of 'retrieval' questions.

Prediction is one of the pleasures of reading. Authors embed deliberate prediction-potential situations in their writing as if to say, 'I hope you do some predicting now!'

Literature can't be dismissed or patronised as 'pure imagination'. It's the mix of feelings and ideas attached to beings we recognise and care about. So literature can enable us to grapple with abstractions while we think we're dealing with emotion. Or vice versa.

Starting from speech bubbles on murals at Pompeii, picture books, cartoons and graphic novels have evolved to tell multimodal stories in ways that ask readers to make leaps of understanding as they hop between text and image.

Picture books enable children to make cognitive leaps between text and picture as they figure out the relationship between word and image. This advances logic, perception, reason...and much more.

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Some short thoughts on why picture books are so important

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The young child hearing the words of a picture book being read, and looking at the pictures all the while, 'knows more' than the voice only saying the words! The child 'sees' what the text is not saying. This is great for a child's self-awareness and confidence.

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https://writersrumpus.com/2017/11/24/the-wonderful-wordless-spread/amp/
Some good blogs here

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A lovely look at how picturebooks open up different perspectives for us.

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I adore picture books - they are a 32 page art form that offers an eye-opening slice of life. They can do all kinds of things to the beholder; they can captivate, provoke and amuse. Throughout my years as an editor I've been lucky to work with so many fabulous picture book writers and artists, and here are a few of my all-time favorites (and they are all still in print, woohoo!):

This simple, joyful story of a small bear's first experience of seasons is perfectly written -- it won the Ezra Jack Keats Award for its splendid short text. It begins: It was his first year/Everything/was going well/until the first leaf fell/"Are you okay?" he wondered.

I love how David Ezra Stein's book reminds us of a time when everything was new and to see the world with fresh eyes. The expressive little bear does that and we just want to share in his wide-eyed wonder!

Five Little Gefiltes - evokes: laughter

Five curious little gefilte fish have the chutzpah to leave their mama and go out and explore their world (the deli scene is hilarious!). But these little wanderers are sweet enough to come back home at the end because they love their mama! "Mama Gefilte sat on a bench/and the gefiltes came back 'cause each was a mensch."

I am kvelling like Mama Gefilte by the end of this book! Thanks for the laughs and the Yiddish words, author/artist Dave Horowitz!

Fireboat- evokes: perspective

The inspiring true story of the John J. Harvey- a retired New York City Fireboat that was called into service on 9/11 - celebrates the energy and hope of a city and its people. The book begins in 1931 when the fireboat and Empire State Building both were built. It gives us a glimpse of a city that that has been around a long time and that pulls together in times of crisis. It is a heartbreaking celebration of resiliency.

Maira Kalman has written a classic book for our times in just the right tone to introduce picture book readers to New York and 9/11.

Each Kindness - evokes: empathy

Chloe and her friends won't play with the new girl; and sadly, by the time Chloe realizes her mistake, Maya has moved on. This is a story of a missed opportunity to be kind, and even though some feel the ending it harsh, so is reality. I like to think of it as a book that gives the reader the opportunity not to make Chloe's mistake - because you know that Chloe is not going to make it again either.

This book is such a great conversation starter. Jacqueline Woodson's spare, elegant text and E. B. Lewis's shimmering, impressionistic art provoke readers and reminds them that they have the power to be kind and that each kindness makes the world a little better.

Miss Maple's Seeds -evokes: appreciation

Miss Maple is a nurturer. She is the size of a bird and lives in a tree and makes sure every seed has a chance to reach its full potential. Miss Maple's world is captivating! The art is enchanting with its rich palette of burnt oranges, warm golds and peacock blues. Flower lantern boats, snug treehouses and miles and miles of gorgeous landscapes, and especially seeds that grow into glorious trees, reminds us that nature is truly magical!

The experience of entering Miss Maple's world is what a good picture book is all about - bravo Eliza Wheeler! It's enchanting, eye-opening and inspiring. I will leave you with the words of Miss Maple: "Take care my little ones, for the world is big and you are small. But never forget that even the grandest of seeds had to grow up from the smallest of seeds."

is the President and Publisher of Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. The imprint publishes fifteen books a year and focuses on eye-opening, often funny picture books and middle grade fiction from diverse and distinct voices, especially stories that are inventive and emotionally satisfying. A few of the New York Times bestsellers she has edited include National Book Award and Newbery Honor Winner Nancy Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt, and Miss Maple's Seeds by Eliza Wheeler. She's on Twitter @nancyrosep

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The Power of the Picture Book: Nancy Paulsen

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I adore picture books - they are a 32 page art form that offers an eye-opening slice of life. They can do all kinds of things to the beholder; they can captivate, provoke and amuse.

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An excellent resource for anyone looking for ideas for classroom reading

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One of the aims of the National Curriculum is to 'develop a love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment'. So whatever book you're reading to your class, or planning from, link it to other similar titles to get the children reading more widely. I have developed these simple book webs to get you started.

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Some really nice articles about Picturebooks here

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What kids are saying about the books they're reading.

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Picturebook Makers/DPICTUS: 100 outstanding picturebooks

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Through the year, we invite guest curators - international picturebook and illustration specialists - to independently highlight their favourite picturebooks showcased on the dPICTUS platform. The 100 Outstanding Picturebooks showcase features the titles which have been highlighted by the most guest curators, and includes an eclectic mix of new-and-soon-to-be-released picturebooks, as well as classic backlist titles. Due to the Covid-19 situation, we're currently unable to present a physical showcase at book fairs, but we hope you'll enjoy viewing the 100 Outstanding Picturebooks on dPICTUS instead. Members can view these titles in full; non-members can see two spreads from each title.

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Through the year, we invite guest curators - international picturebook and illustration specialists - to independently highlight their favourite picturebooks showcased on the dPICTUS platform. The 100 Outstanding Picturebooks showcase features the titles which have been highlighted by the most guest curators, and includes an eclectic mix of new-and-soon-to-be-released picturebooks, as well as classic backlist titles.

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Debbi Redpath Ohi writes  about picturebooks

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Debbi Redpath Ohi writes  about picturebooks

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A great blog here by @inkyelbows

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November is Picture Book Month, when schools, libraries, booksellers and book lovers around the world come together to celebrate the print picture book. I strongly encourage you to check out PictureBookMonth.com, where members of the children's lit community have been posting essays each day about why they believe picture books are important.

The following lists some of the reasons I believe that picture books are important. I've also included the covers of just a few of the many wonderful picture books that have come out in 2013 so far. Click on any cover to find out more info.

Picture books are important because of how readers interact with them, especially the read-aloud experience. No matter how many awards it may have won or how beautiful the prose or illustrations, an unread picture book collecting dust on a shelf is just paper and cardboard. The magic begins when a child or grown-up reader opens up the book.

Some parents try to rush their children out of picture books into chapter books because they believe that reading text-heavy books will help young people prepare for standardized testing, not realizing that picture books can be a valuable resource and enjoyed by older children, even up through high school.

With the above mind, here's why I think picture books are important:

Picture books introduce children to the concept of reading, even if they can't read yet. In a Boston.com interview, Bob Staake said that when he was a kid, he used to flip through grown-up magazines and fixate on whatever graphic element caught his attention (e.g. a photo, an illustration, an ad). "That was reading to me. That is the way kids start to read, and parents don't respect it enough. The idea that looking at things is not as important as reading the written word, that's BS."

Picture books encourage conversations between young and older readers. While some children enjoy reading picture books on their own, it's often the case that an adult or older sibling reads to a younger child. Reading a picture book aloud prompts conversations about what's happening in the story, what the characters are feeling, meanings of words, how what's happening might relate to the child.

Picture books help bridge the gap between generations, strengthening bonds and forming connections as an older reader (whether parent, grandparent, older sibling, teacher, librarian, etc.) reads aloud to a child.

Picture books strengthen visual thinking skills. Picture books help children connect what they observe with how they reason, linking concepts with words.

Picture books introduce children to a love of art in a way that just taking a child to an art gallery can't achieve. The illustrations aren't mere decoration to the text. They enhance the story and emotions. The context encourages a child to go back to different pictures over and over, noticing new things, reading characters' emotions and interactions, possible secondary subplots that are told only in the pictures.

Picture books teach children how to be better listeners. In a read-aloud experience, children learn that paying attention makes reading the book much more fun. As Emma Walton Hamilton points out, this helps prepare children to become better listeners in later life.

Picture books help children develop critical thinking skills. Karen Lotz of Candlewick Press points out in a New York Times piece: "To some degree, picture books force an analog way of thinking. From picture to picture, as the reader interacts with the book, their imagination is filling in the missing themes." Picture books stimulate a state of mind in children that words alone can't achieve, says J. Richard Gentry in Psychology Today.

Picture books give young readers a sense of control and help build self-confidence. In a world where there seem to be so many things that they aren't allowed to do and where adults have final say, a picture book offers an opportunity for a child to feel part of the story and control the pacing of the story. They can pause over certain pages, go back to revisit another part of the story. They can read slowly or quickly.

Picture books introduce complex concepts in a safe environment. Some even recommend using picture books for older children (middle school and high school), to set the stage for introducing broader topics of study like art or history, or for illustrating an abstract concept. "With picture books, each student in the class can access new information at his/her individual level of readiness," says Keith Schoch in Basic Literacy Through Picture Books.

Picture books help children discover themselves and the world. No matter what the topic or issue or emotion, there is likely a picture book that addresses it.

Picture books help build vocabulary. Children will often be introduced to words in picture books that they would not find in simpler early readers. Even when an adult isn't around to help, defining unknown words becomes easier because the pictures provide clues to the reader.

Picture books plant the seed for writing skills. "It is the joyous power of picture books that turns young listeners into readers and readers into writers," says Charles Ghigna.

Picture books help show children that reading is important. Especially in a world where everything moves so quickly and adults are always rushing around and busy, the fact that a grown-up will take the time to read a book aloud to a child sends a positive message about reading as well as about the relationship.

Picture books encourage joy in reading. Reading picture books is FUN, whether by yourself or with a grown-up or child. When being read to, a child can tell that the adult is enjoying himself/herself, and that helps reinforce the message that READING IS FUN.

Picture books offer comfort. They're non-threatening, they're fun to read. Children (and grown-ups!) go back to reread familiar picture books. For me, rereading a favorite childhood picture book is like visiting an old friend. Or coming home.

If any of the above has helped convince you of the importance of picture books, I encourage you to do one or more of the following:

(1) Go to the library and read through some picture books. Find your favorites, discover new favorites.

(2) Read a picture book aloud to a young person. If you don't have children, then visit a friend or family member who does. :-)

(3) Tweet or blog about a picture book that you like. It could be a newer book that you've just discovered, or tell us about one of your favorite picture books from childhood.

(4) Go to your local children's bookstore and buy a picture book. This not only helps support the bookstore but also the people who helped create it.

(5) Feel free to share the image below. No need to link back to my blog (but you're free to, of course!) but please do keep my copyright info intact.

Now go forth and read a picture book!

Source material, related resources and other helpful links:
PictureBookMonth.com
Parents - Empower Children As Thinkers With Picture Books! - by J. Richard Gentry, Ph.D.

Bob Staake: Illustrator and looker (subscription needed)

Creating Reluctant Readers and Picture Books - by Heather Newman

How Picture Books Play A Role In A Child's Development - by Lori Calabrese

Introduction to Show Me A Story: Why Picture Books Matter - by David Wiesner

Not Too Old For Picture Books - Heart Of The Matter

Basic Literacy Through Picture Books (video) - by Keith Schoch

Why Picture Books Matter: 7 Reasons To Read With Your Child - on Britmums

Critical Literacy: Using Picture Books To Read The World - by Alexis Birner (M.Ed) and Lindsay Bromley (M.Ed)

Picture Books Are Not Just For Children: 10 Reasons Why - by Rick Walton

How Picture Books Can Help Children Read Better - Studydog.com

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Why Picture Books Are Important - Inkygirl: Guide For Kidlit/YA Writers & Artists - via @inkyelbows

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November is Picture Book Month, when schools, libraries, booksellers and book lovers around the world come together to celebrate the print picture book. I strongly encourage you to check out PictureBookMonth.com, where members of the children's lit community have been posting essays each day about why they believe picture books are important.

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Loved by many for his illustrations of children's books,  Edward Ardizzone was a prolific artist, as his biography http://www.kids-bookreview.com/2017/02/review-edward-ardizzone-artist-and.html
and this vimeo show.

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A Voyage round Edward Ardizzone, Artist and illustrator

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Allan Powers, architectural historian and historian of 20th century graphic arts, speaks on ‘A Voyage round Edward Ardizzone, artist and illustrator.’ The creator of Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain, a children’s book that was a runaway success on both sides of the Atlantic in 1936, the English artist Edward Ardizzone has only recently become the subject of a general study in depth. Alan Powers, author of a new monograph, will introduce the many aspects of Ardizzone’s work during a prolific career spanning 50 years, during which he was a war artist, teacher, printmaker and muralist as well as illustrating nearly 200 books.

October 26, 2016

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If, like me, you're enthralled by Shaun Tan's work, here's a really nice article about Surrealism in Tan's art:

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Our Illustrator of the Month blog series is a chance to find out more about your favourite illustrators, or to discover new ones. So far, we've written on classic authors like Elsa Beskow, cult illustrators like Tomi Ungerer and Tove Jansson, and modern picture book makers like Jon Klassen.

This month we've chosen a living and working artist, the brilliant Shaun Tan. Shaun Tan is known for his surreal and socially conscious work, which manages to blend outlandish imagination with real-life relatability. His work as an illustrator is unique and recognisable, he combines vivid, sweeping backgrounds with his distinctive character shapes. His work is challenging and difficult to categorise, often addressing things not broached in standard picture-books. So much so that bookshops in his native Australia and beyond have begun carving out sections for picture books for adults. Though dark at times, his writing is ultimately optimistic, and his drawings show the limitless scope of his imagination.

Double spread from Tales from Outer Suburbia

Tales from Outer Suburbia

Shaun Tan grew up in the suburbs of Perth in Western Australia. He became known at school for being good at drawing, and while still a teenager he began publishing illustrations for sci-fi and horror stories in small-press magazines. It's easy to imagine the young artist creating imaginative worlds to escape from the blankness of a suburban upbringing. Tales from Outer Suburbia, one of Tan's books as both writer and illustrator, is a collection of stories of surreal goings on in an otherwise normal suburb. In , (which was also released as a stand-alone book due to its popularity), the narrator tells us about a foreign exchange student coming to stay with his family. The exchange student's hard-to-pronounce name is shortened, and the spare bedroom is all made up and ready for him. But the text's first hint that something is amiss comes when Eric tells the family he would prefer to sleep in the pantry. Eric is endearingly tiny,(illustrations show him carrying a hollowed out peanut shell as luggage), and polite, so his strangeness is basically accepted by the family. "It must be a cultural thing", is the mother's explanation.

Many of Shaun Tan's books feature characters who feel out of place in the culture and context they find themselves in. The Arrival, his most famous work, tells the familiar story of a migrant seeking new opportunity abroad, but tells it in a completely new way. The man in this book lands in a bewildering city of strange animals, floating objects and an indecipherable language, and his journey is shown entirely through pictures.

From The Arrival. A full blog post on The Arrival is coming soon!

In an article for Viewpoint Magazine about creating The Arrival, Shaun Tan wrote that he has,

"a recurring interest in notions of 'belonging'...One contributing experience may have been that of growing up in Perth, one of the most isolated cities in the world, sandwiched between a vast desert and a vaster ocean... Being half-Chinese at a time and place when this was fairly unusual may have compounded this..."

He gathered anecdotes of immigrant experiences; including those of his father, friends and partner, and found the common threads in their stories to help create The Arrival. This has meant that even though its setting is outlandishly inventive, this story is a very familiar one for most people.

The ''Real" in Surreal

In Rules of Summer Shaun Tan again allows us to recognise ourselves in settings that lie beyond the realms of our wildest imaginations. In a book made up of large format illustrations and double spreads, we get a sense of Australia's open expanses of sky and roads, and its shimmering heat.

But these recognisable elements are woven into bizarre worlds, to which the sparse text offers no explanation. "This is what I learned last summer" the narrator tells us. The lessons listed and seem simple enough, "never leave the back door open overnight, "never eat the last olive at a party". But the images show us the consequences of these actions: if you leave the door open a spontaneous growth of lizards and glowing fungi will take over your living room. If you eat the last olive at a party an army of humanoid hawks will devour you. Shaun Tan's world is what you get when you mess up the dials on the TV. Colour and contrast are suddenly heightened and skewed, but we can still see the reality that remains underneath. The growths in your living room might be poisonous spiders from your Australian back garden. The hawks might be a room full of your parents' friends who think you've got bad manners. Tan has said that he created this particular illustration while attending various social functions related to his Oscar win in 2011, (for an animated adaptation of The Lost Thing), which might explain why the hawks are wearing tuxedos!

Millions and Millions of Rabbits

The allegories in Shaun Tan's work aren't limited to harmless suburban happenings though. In 1999, the Children's Book Council of Australia awarded him and writer John Marsden a Picture Book of the Year award for The Rabbits. In reference to colonialism and the destruction of the Aboriginal way of life in Australia, rabbits invade a country in their millions, build a rabbit society, and wipe out what was there before. The choice of rabbits as the invading animal in this book adds another frame of reference, as rabbits caused havoc in Australia's unique ecosystem when artificially introduced into the country by humans. The Rabbits is an allegory for all times, and all cultures, about human ignorance and greed.

It would be easy to classify Shaun Tan as a writer for adults alone, based on the challenging content of some of his books. Responding to criticism levelled at The Rabbits in the Australian media, Tan writes on his website that the book was originally conceived for older readers. But to limit his books to an adult readership would be to do children a disservice. Children can handle more than they're given credit for, and at the core of a lot of Shaun Tan's work is a childlike innocence and ultimately optimistic outlook on the world. His books often feature creatures that the average adult wouldn't find sympathetic, but that children will be drawn to. And in a scenario that many parents will recognise, the oddest creatures are adopted as pets! In The Lost Thing, the narrator tells us about a time he found a Lost Thing and tried to find a place for it. No reference is made in the text to what this "thing" looks like. Shaun Tan gives himself full rein to design a completely unrecognisable creature, which ends up as massive red metal thing with octopus legs and metal spikes on top... and somehow still manages to be sort of cute!

Because this is a picture book, and not a novel, there is no long passages of text explaining where the Thing came from or why it exists. It is just there, and when we read the book we become its friend, and that's that. This essential lack of judgement is what makes Shaun Tan so appealing to children, and adults who want to stay in touch with that glimmer of innocence inside themselves. There is also plenty here for children who love to read the same books over and over again, playfulness abounds in the small details of Tan's illustrations. A newspaper page shows us where the Thing might have a place after all; The Federal Department of Odds & Ends, whose Latin motto is sweepus underum carpetae. (If Harry Potter has taught us anything, it's that children love a bit of nonsensical bureaucracy in their books). Other articles on the page, that adults might gloss over but sponge-like children will not, include a product recall for a potentially lethal fault in "model 350A Deluxe 'Suck & Slice' automated beet cutters".

Back to Basics

The majority of Shaun Tan's work comes from a completely new and invented place, but like all great writers he is also interested in where stories come from, and what came before him. He explores this in The Singing Bones, a collection of sculptures he created based on the Brothers Grimm fairytales. In the introduction to the book the writer Neil Gaiman says that Tan's sculptures do "something profound. His sculptures suggest. They do not describe. They imply; they do not delineate. They are, in themselves, stories." Gaiman's evaluation could be applied to any of Shaun Tan's work; all of his illustrations leave themselves open to interrogation. But Tan may have found his perfect form in sculpture. The rounded shapes of his character design and pointed shapes of his buildings find a perfect balance here, and each sculpture hums with movement and energy even though they are still and quiet.

In his 2D illustrations, Tan often uses collage and mixed media, and his sculptures are no different. In his Hansel and Gretel sculpture ,(which was the first one he made), the children kneel to gobble up real cake decorations from the house behind them, while a witch leers from the shadows. Such a simple idea immediately tells us what story this is, and distills it to its essence.

You get the sense, when reading a Shaun Tan book, that he enjoys his work immensely. That he feels lucky to be able to create such weird stories and drawings and not only have them published, but have them loved and appreciated by masses of people. The feeling is infectious. Seeing an artist give their imagination full rein makes us wonder what else there is to be discovered in the world, if we open ourselves up to all of life's infinite possibilities.

Find all of the books mentioned, and more Shaun Tan books, here.

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Suburban Surrealism: The World of Shaun Tan

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Our Illustrator of the Month blog series is a chance to find out more about your favourite illustrators, or to discover new ones. So far, we've written on classic authors like Elsa Beskow, cult illustrators like Tomi Ungerer and Tove Jansson, and modern picture book makers like Jon Klassen.

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Lots to savour here

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Reviews of children's picture books and interviews with illustrators and authors

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Learn about some new international Picturebook Makers

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Welcome to the Picturebook Makers blog - where some of the world's finest picturebook authors and illustrators take you behind the scenes.

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I have loved Jane's work ever since reading The Wolf back in the 90s. Here she explains some of her techniques:

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Make a cuppa and sip on the pictorial delights of Jane Tanner's endearing children's book 'Love from Grandma'.

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Oz has a fair share of great picturebook illustrators and auteurs: think of Shaun Tan, Bob Graham, Jane Tanner, Mem Fox and many other instantly recognisable

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Look! The art of Australian picture books today | State Library Victoria

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'I love creating characters and having them live with me for while. I enjoyed creating the little suburb that Amy and Louis lived in, with its beach and shops and lovely houses. I like the challenge involved in solving each page.

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Read about illustrators and authors

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This month's Featured Illustrator is Pam Smy. Senior Lecturer of the Illustration Course for the Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University, Pam is an amazingly evocative illustrator in her own right, and as a writer is about to release her first novel. Tomorrow (11th March) she's running the SCBWI Masterclass workshop Building Words for Your Character at The House of Illustration near King's Cross in London.

For more of her work, check her Featured Illustrator Gallery.

As a child we moved around a lot, and from the age of 10 onwards I lived mostly in rural areas, so much of my time was spent outside. I loved building dens in the garden or nature-spotting with my Usborne Spotter's Guide in hand. My early years were in a mostly book-less house. I had an adored bind-up of Frances Hodgson Burnett novels - The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Little Princess. I read them over and over. I believed in being nice, that everything would turn out okay and that robins were good. In my teen years this evolved into wandering aimlessly down country lanes trying to look hopeful and melancholy at the same time, or exploring overgrown byways on my bicycle.

I was out of place at the local youth club. I joined the local watercolour evening class (I was the only non-retired member) instead of hanging out with the cool kids at the village bus stop.

My step-dad was a greetings card sales rep. He brought home portfolios of Christmas or Mother's Day cards, pastoral scenes at sunrise and depictions of Victorian streets in fog. In those black glossy books cards by Babette Cole, Nick Butterworth and Anthony Browne nudged up alongside traditional painting. It was an introduction to a rich and varied diet of imagery neatly organised in shiny cellophane-protected presentation pages. It was a gallery in my home, and the show evolved season by season.

I dropped out of my A levels, and went to study a BTEC at Suffolk College in Ipswich instead. My realisation of what drawing was, and how much I loved it began there. And, at the end of the 80's, if you loved drawing you became an illustrator, not a fine artist. So I applied to the BA Illustration at Cambridge School of Art. It was my only choice. I got in.

Observational drawing became my obsession and I spent most of my three years drawing in Working Men's clubs, in pubs, at ballroom dance classes and in WI meetings. I loved it. But I graduated with a portfolio that was so based in the fact of what I had seen/could see that I had no skill in developing an imaginative voice. To explore the various ways that observation can feed into imaginative work has been my quest over the last twenty years.

Since graduating I had published work in educational texts, folk and fairy tale compendiums, and the odd chapter book, but was unsatisfied with the look and feel of my work. I felt I could do better. The MA in Children's Book Illustration was established back at Cambridge School of Art in 2001. I applied. I got in. And it changed my life.

Meeting a group of people that were similarly obsessed made my quest feel like home. Children's books being your 'specialist subject' was okay - more than okay - it was cool. I had found the equivalent to the village bus stop in a purpose built Victorian red brick art school in Cambridge. I could talk about colour, pen nibs, brands of ink, long dead illustrators and new emerging illustration talent with a bunch of hard-working enthusiasts. After working alone in my bedsit having feedback on my work and my ideas challenged was a welcome breath of fresh air.

My work has continued to evolve since I completed the course in 2004, and I have been lucky to have had steady commissions alongside teaching on the MA since I graduated. But for me, the breakthrough in discovering my 'niche' was when I was contacted in 2008 by designer, Ness Wood, who had seen my graduation show four years previously.

Ness had recalled projects I have developed where my love of nature was a key part, and put me forward to illustrate Lob by Linda Newbery. What a dream job! This story about a child who discovers friendship and understanding through being outdoors swept me right back to The Secret Garden, and to those teenage meanderings in the countryside. With one commission separate jigsaw pieces of my life began to drop in place and fit together in a way that made the future clearer.

I was clear that I loved working in response to chapter book texts or novels. I wanted to work on books that involved close relationships between characters and their environment. If that environment was a natural environment, all the better.

I have been working with Ness on projects for David Fickling Books over the last eight years, and feel very at home with their nurturing, collaborative approach to making books. I have worked on books by Linda Newbery, Siobhan Dowd, Penelope Lively and now, my own novel, due later this year.

Each of these books, including the forthcoming Thornhill, are set in places that are crucial to the story - gardens, haunted cottages, alpine landscapes, pagan islands and abandoned houses. I love using my sketchbooks to construct what these spaces and places look and feel like, and working out how the characters relate to those spaces.

Sketchbooks are crucial to how I work. I use them as 'safe places' to draw out ideas and roughs repeatedly, often then scanning my favourite to use as final artwork. I rarely work in colour, preferring to work with a dip pen and ink, and layers of tone with ink washes, emulsion paint or, and in the case of the banner art above, soft pencil. I collect antique dip pen nibs whenever I find them, and am always surprised and excited by the differences between one type of nib and another.

I split my time between teaching and illustrating. For me talking about and working with illustration is a way of life rather than a job - and I feel blessed that it has worked out this way.

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For more of Pam's work, see herFeatured Illustrator Gallery.
You can follow Pam Smy on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @PamSmyIllustrator
Pam is represented by the Elizabeth Roy Literary Agency

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This month's Featured Illustrator is Pam Smy. Senior Lecturer of the Illustration Course for the Cambridge School of Art at Anglia Ruskin University, Pam is an amazingly evocative illustrator in her own right, and as a writer is about to release her first novel.

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The people at Booktrust have created a wonderful resource for choosing books - including picturebooks

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Find exciting books for children of all ages from BookTrust

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A resource for those who would like some picturebooks from other countries

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A resource for those who would like some picturebooks from other countries

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This is a great resource for learning about authors and llustrators

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Michael Rosen is one of the most popular authors of stories and poems for children. His bestselling titles, published by Walker Books, include Little Rabbit Foo Foo, Michael Rosen's Sad Book, This Is Our House, Tiny Little Fly, Dear Mother Goose and its sequel Dear Fairy Godmother. Michael received the Eleanor Farjeon Award in 1997, and was the Children's Laureate from 2007 to 2009. He is a distinguished critic and academic, co-directing an MA in Children's Literature at Birkbeck College. Michael lives in London with his family.

Helen Oxenbury is among the most popular and critically acclaimed illustrators of her time. Her numerous books for children include Smarties Book Prize-winning Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell; We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen; as well as her classic board books for babies. She won the Kate Greenaway Medal for Alice in Wonderland. Her most recent picture book was the critically acclaimed There's Going to Be a Baby, the first book-publishing collaboration between her and her husband John Burningham. Helen lives in London.

Mac Barnett is the author of several picture books, including the hugely successful Guess Again, illustrated by Adam Rex. He also penned the Brixton Brothers series of mysteries; the first Brixton Brothers book, The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, was nominated for the 2010 Edgar Award for best Juvenile. He is the founder of the Echo Park Time Travel Mart, a convenience store for time travellers. He lives in Berkeley, California, USA. Visit his website at www.macbarnett.com.

Jon Klassenis the writer and illustrator of the bestselling and award-winning picture books I Want My Hat Back (9781406338539) and This Is Not My Hat (9781406343939).He is also the creator of illustrations for the popular series The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, and served as an illustrator on the animated feature film Coraline. Originally from Niagara Falls, Canada, he lives in Los Angeles, USA. Visit his website at www.burstofbeaden.com.

Mary Murphy is the author-illustrator of Walker picture books How Kind!, I Kissed the Baby, Utterly Lovely One and novelty title, A Kiss Like This. She has also created manyWalker Baby board books including Mouse Is Small and companion titles, Quick Duck and Slow Snail - described by the Irish Independent as"beautifully designed board books, with colourful artwork and simple, easy-to-follow stories". Mary lives in Galway, Ireland.

Eric Carleis the renowned children's book author and illustrator, most famous for his picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has been translated into over 30 languages worldwide. Since The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle has illustrated more than seventy books including Brown Bear, Brown Bear and What Do You See? and more than 71 million copies of his books have sold around the world. He is also the founder of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, a non-profit organization set up to inspire a love of art and reading through picture books, to which all of the royalties from this book will go.

Salvatore Rubbino is a rising talent in the world of illustration. His first book for children, A Walk in New York, was shortlisted for the V&A Illustration Awards, his second, A Walk in London, won an SLA Information Book Award, and his third, Just Ducks! (written by Nicola Davies), was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Salvatore teaches on the MA Children's Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art and at Southampton Solent University. He lives in London.

Author of How Tom Beat Captain Najork, A Near Thing For Captain Najork and The Rain Door

Russell Hoban is the author of many famous novels, including Turtle Diary and Riddley Walker, which won the John W. Campbell Award for science fiction. He also wrote over 50 children's books, including such classics as The Mouse and His Child, The Sea-Thing Child and, most recently, Rosie's Magic Horse. Born in Pennsylvania in 1925, he moved in 1969 to London, where he lived until his death in 2011.

Quentin Blakeis one of the world's foremost illustrators, particularly renowned for his collaboration with writers such as Russell Hoban, Michael Rosen, Joan Aiken and Roald Dahl. His books have won numerous awards, including the Whitbread Prize, the Kate Greenaway Medal and the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration. In 1999 he was appointed the first Children's Laureate, in 2005 was created a CBE and in 2013 received a knighthood for his services to illustration. He lives in London.

John Burningham is widely regarded as one of the world's finest picture book artists. With over 35 books to his name, he has twice been awarded the Kate Greenaway Medal, for Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers and Mr Gumpy's Outing. Among his other celebrated books is Granpa, for which he was awarded the Kurt Maschler Award, and which was later made into a successful feature film. He lives in London.

Dallas Clayton is the author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed Awesome Book series, as well as the poetry collection Make Magic! Do Good! Dallas lives in California, USA. Visit his website at www.dallasclayton.com

Steve Lightis the author-illustrator of many books for children, including The Christmas Giant and Zephyr Takes Flight. He lives in New York City. Visit his website at www.stevelightart.com

Petr Horacek's bold and imaginative illustrations continue to captivate children and critics. His stories, often about loyalty and belonging, are told with an instinctive warmth and humour and are beautifully brought to life through his evocative use of colour and texture. He has won many awards around the world for classics such as Suzy Goose and A New House for Mouse and was shortlisted for the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 2012. He lives in Worcester.

Author and illustrator of The Almost Fearless Hamilton Squidlegger

Timothy Basil Ering is the illustrator of the multiple-award-winning The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo and Snook Alone by Marilyn Nelson, as well as the acclaimed author-illustrator of The Story of Frog Belly Rat Bone and Necks Out for Adventure! He lives in the USA in Kingston, Massachusetts, with his wife and sons.

Author and illustrator of and The Pigeon Needs A Bath Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs

Mo Willems is a three-time Caldecott Honor winner for Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale and Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity. His celebrated Elephant & Piggie early-reader series has been awarded the Theodor Seuss Geisel Medal on two occasions as well as three Honors. Other favourites include Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs and That Is Not a Good Idea. Before he turned to children's books, Mo was a writer and animator on Sesame Street, where he won six Emmy Awards. Mo lives with his family in Paris, France.

Hélène Boudreau is a native of Canada and has had several popular books for children published there. She lives in Markham, Ontario, Canada. Visit her website at www.heleneboudreau.com or tweet @helenboudreau

Serge Bloch is one of the most prolific and talented French illustrators working today. He has won the Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators, the Bologna Ragazzi award, and the Best Book Award in Taiwan. A native of France, Serge Bloch now divides his time between New York and Paris, where he is Artistic Director of the children's publishing house Bayard Jeunesse. Visit his website at www.sergebloch.net

Jenni Desmond is an illustrator, artist and picture book author, working from a studio in a rattling railway arch in south London. She graduated with distinction from the Masters in Children's Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art (APU). Her first picture book won the Cambridgeshire 'Read it Again' Picture Book award 2013. Jenni lives in London.

Hervé Tulletis the creator of over 50 children's books. He was born in Normandy, and later studied Fine Arts and Decorative Arts before working as an Art Director. Hervé Tullet loves to provoke surprise when he meets children and the magic also works through his much-awaited books; he was awarded the Sorcières Prize 2010. Hervé lives in Paris.

Lucy Cousins is the multi-award-winning creator of Maisy. Other titles include the Smarties Book Prize-winner Jazzy in the Jungle, Hooray for Fish! - which now appears in animation in Japan; the bestselling New York Times Top 10 Children's Book Yummy;and the critically acclaimed I'm the Best. Lucy Cousins' books have sold over 26 million copies worldwide and are available in 29 different languages. Lucy lives in Petersfield, Hampshire with her partner and four children.

Aaron Becker began drawing picture books at the age of eight. After many years of practice, he published his first wordless picture book, Journey. He is now on a quest to share his books with as many young readers as possible. "There is nothing more gratifying than seeing kids hold one of my books close to their heart," he says. "My hope is that these stories might inspire us all to place a bit more faith in the power of wonder." Aaron Becker lives in the USA in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.

Birgitta Sif was born in Reykjavik, Iceland, and lived in and around Scandanavia and America while growing up. She completed her BFA from Cornell University and worked as a graphic designer in New York before deciding to enrol on Anglia Ruskin's world-renowned Children's Book Illustration MA course in Cambridge. Her debut picture book, Oliver, won the Icelandic Dimmalimm Prize and was endorsed by Amnesty. Birgitta lives with her family in Sweden.

Viviane Schwarz is the author-illustrator of the highly acclaimed picture books There Are Cats in this Book and There Are No Cats in this Book, both of which were shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal (2009, 2012). She also illustrates picture books by her friend Alexis Deacon and their title A Place to Call Home was shortlisted for the Roald Dahl Funny prize in 2011. Viviane was named one of the Booktrust's Best New Illustrators 2011. She lives in London.

Shirley Hughes has won many prestigious awards, including the Kate Greenaway Medal twice. She began to write and design her own picture books when she had a young family and has now published more than two hundred titles. Shirley also wrote her first novel, Hero on a Bicycle in 2012. She lives in London.

Nicola Davies is an award-winning author, whose many books for children include A First Book of Nature, Ice Bear, Big Blue Whale, Dolphin Baby, Bat Loves the Night and the Silver Street Farm series. She graduated in zoology, studied whales and bats and then worked for the BBC Natural History Unit. Nicola lives in Abergavenny, Wales. Visit Nicola as www.nicola-davies.com.

Laura Carlin is a graduate of the Royal College of Art and the winner of several awards, including the V&A Book Illustration Award. Her work has featured in Vogue, the Guardian and The New York Times, and she also illustrated The Iron Man by Ted Hughes, which was awarded an honourable mention in the Bologna Ragazzi Award fiction category. Laura lives in London. See Laura's work at lauracarlin.blogspot.co.uk.

lives and works in Worcestershire (home of the sauce). She studied illustration at Falmouth College of Art, and went on to work for two years as a children's print designer at a studio in Northampton, whilst working freelance on children's books and greetings cards. She has exhibited with her Girls Who Draw and Inkygoodness across the UK, and had a jolly good time painting up a totem pole for the Pictoplasma Character Walk exhibition 2011. Worst in Show is Kate's first picture book for Walker Books.

Anthony Browne is one of the most celebrated author-illustrators working today. Children's Laureate from 2009 to 2011 and winner of multiple awards - including the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal and the much-coveted Hans Christian Andersen Award - Anthony is renowned for his unique style. His work is loved and admired all around the world. Anthony lives in Canterbury, Kent.

Inga Moore has illustrated numerous classics to much critical acclaim, including Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett and Oscar Wilde's The Canterville Ghost. Published almost twenty years ago, her title Six Dinner Sid continues to grace bookshop shelves and won the Smarties Book Prize. Her most recent picture book, A House in the Woods, was descibed by Nicolette Jones as "the most beautiful picture book, and it makes you fall in love with Autumn". Inga lives in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

is an award-winning author/illustrator and graphic designer. Born in Aichi, Japan, in 1968, Taro specialized in silkscreen printing at Osaka University of Arts. He was first selected to exhibit his work in the Bologna Children's Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition fiction category in 2001, and has since exhibited his work in the Fiction and Non-Fiction categories several times. Taro works internationally and he is regularly published in Japan, France, Switzerland and Italy. This is his first book with Walker. Taro lives in Japan.

Katie May Green is a graduate from the Cambridge School of Art MA in Children's Book Illustration. She has created artwork for UK and US publishers including HarperCollins, Penguin and Oxford University Press. Seen and Not Heard is Katie's first picture book. Katie lives in Somerset. Visit Katie's website at www.katiemaygreen.co.uk

Valentina Mendicino studied illustration and animation at the European Institute of Design in Milan. Since 2005, she has been a freelance illustrator, working in Milan for several advertising agencies. She decided to leave Italy and move to England where she obtained an MA in children's book illustration from the Cambridge School of Art. This experience changed her life and she discovered a whole new dimension in the art world, leading her to her first published book. She now works and lives in London. Visit her at http://chigaia.blogspot.co.uk

Author and illustrator of Nurse Clementine

Simon James, author and illustrator of Nurse Clementine, grew up in Bristol and Exeter and from an early age spent much of his time drawing and stapling stories into little books. Leon and Bob won the Smarties Book Prize Silver Award and was the and RoboMum. Simon continues to be a much sought-after speaker in schools, and at festivals and conferences both in the UK and in the USA. New York Times' Best Illustrated Book of the Year, and Days Like This, a collection of small poems, was shortlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Baby Brains was the overall winner of the Red House Children's Book Award in 2005, voted for by 25,000 children, and Simon followed up this success with two more Baby Brains titles, Baby Brains Superstar and Baby Brains

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Michael Rosen is one of the most popular authors of stories and poems for children. His bestselling titles, published by Walker Books, include Little Rabbit Foo Foo, Michael Rosen's Sad Book, This Is Our House, Tiny Little Fly, Dear Mother Goose and its sequel Dear Fairy Godmother.

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Watch as several authors and/or illustrators share what they think is the essence of a picture book :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GCJ-iGhTxA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GCJ-iGhTxA

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This blog post by @TracyMarchini   is worth a read! Here's the template folks - just add genius!

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Tracy Marchini - Literary Agent & Children's Author

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What makes one picture book a bestseller and another a flop? While there's no way to predict a bestseller, many of the most successful picture books have some (or all) of these factors:

1.) Illustrations that are colorful, varied and full of movement. Successful picture books surprise the reader by the art on the next page - whether it's by using an unexpected image for humor, or using a different perspective (looking at something from above rather than below, or close up rather than far away), or using mixed media in ways artists haven't done before, etc. (FYI: If you are an author, you'll be paired with an illustrator by your publisher, so generally authors have no control over this factor. Publishers tend to match lesser known authors with well-known illustrators, hoping to introduce the author to the illustrator's established audience.)

2.) Lovable, identifiable characters. Kids read picture books to see other kids (or kid-friendly characters) accomplish big things. The typical "try 3 times and then succeed" type of picture book requires the protagonist to fix their own problem, because what we want to tell children is that though they may be small, they can be independent/fix their problems in their own ways.

3.) Universal appeal. Fancy Nancy has taken off because it found something that almost all little girls like to do (play dress up) and turned the book into something as sparkly and fabulous as the activity itself. The illustrations are very distinct, there is glitter throughout the book, and Nancy is even more over-the-top in her dress up choices than the most diva-ish of six-year-olds. There is another level though, than just sparkle and glitter. Externally, Nancy wants to be fabulous, but internally, she just wants her family to play dress up with her and accept her 'fabulousness.' (Eventually, they do.)

4.) Humor. Funny picture books that take a new/unique look at something old do wonderfully. For example, in Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin's Duck For President, we saw someone climb through the ranks of government - but that someone was a duck. It was funny, it had jokes for both the parent and the child, and it featured an unlikely but child-friendly candidate for president.

5.) A strong/unique concept. A picture book needs to be layered enough that it makes sense as a fully illustrated book, instead of an easy reader or a short story. The layers come from the internal/emotional problem and the external/physical problem working together, so that when the character is actively working towards one goal, they are unwittingly working towards the other as well. The art also has to give us an additional layer to the story, not just show us renderings of the text.

6.) Pattern and/or repetition. Some books are successful because of a refrain that kids like to hear repeated. For example, Munsch's Love You Forever has the refrain "I'll love you forever/I'll like you for always/As long as I'm living/My baby you'll be." It's sweet, it works throughout the whole book but in a different context, and the meter is perfect. Fun fact: My favorite picture book as a child was Chatty Chipmunk's Nutty Day by Suzanne Gruber, because of the alliterative refrain, "Chitter chitter chatter, I like nuts!" (I'm not really sure about what that choice says about me as a person.)

7.) Rhyme that's well-written/necessary. If it's a rhyming text, the rhyme has to flow smoothly and each line has to further the plot. Sometimes authors are tempted to throw in a line just because it rhymes with "dog" or whatever the previous line is (i.e. "At school today there was a dog/he did not bring himself a log.") Some concepts do make more sense in rhyme than in prose. For example, if you're writing a book about a jazz musician, then you can use rhyme to imitate the rhythm of music for your reader.

8.) Interactivity. Some books are more interactive when they're read to a child. In There's A Monster at the End of This Book, Grover talks directly to the reader - begging them not to turn the page!

9.) Re-readability. Because picture books have to be read to the child by the parent and children tend to want the same book read to them over and over again, they have to be something that a parent is going to want to read over 100 times. Part of re-readability is the visual interest in the illustrations, which is why an illustrator will put a small visual subplot (such as the ant slowing stealing food at the picnic) for readers to notice perhaps on the their second or third reading. The other part of re-readability comes from some of the elements above - either a refrain, or humor, or word play.

Take a look at your works-in-progress. Do your picture books have some of these factors? You can download a free .pdf of this blog post here.

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9 Factors That Make A Picture Book Successful | Tracy Marchini - Literary Agent & Children's Author

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What makes one picture book a bestseller and another a flop? While there's no way to predict a bestseller, many of the most successful picture books have some (or all) of these factors: 1.) Illustrations that are colorful, varied and full of movement.

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According to the website, Child's Play is "more than just a publishing programme, it is a philosophy~ -

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The people at Tiny Owl have been asking writers and illustrators and educators - and me! - about picturebooks: "Are Picturebooks just for children?"

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We have been asking children's writers, illustrators, lecturers and journalists:
'Are picture books for children, or adults can enjoy them just as much?'
Below you will find more answers:

Chris Robertson:
Picture books are ONLY for people whose imagination, humor, compassion, love and understanding outweigh the moments they've spent here on earth.

* Chris is an author/illustrator of children's picture books.
Mary Roche: children and adults have opportunities to discuss and share their insights
Picturebooks can be for all age groups. Some are actually not really suitable for very young children because of the serious subject matter. Take Armin Greder's The Island or My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto or The Composition by Antonio Skarméta. Some picturebooks can be enjoyed on many levels by all age groups: books like The Three Robbers by Tomi Ungerer or Yellow Bird, Black Spider by Dosh and Mike Archer, for instance. And some, like Orange, Pear, Apple, Bear by Emily Gravett or This is the Bear by Sarah Hayes and Helen Craig are particularly good for little children. Adult readers have much more prior knowledge than children so can experience a book like Sam and Dave Dig a Hole by Mac Barnet and Jon Klassen, or I am Henry Finch by Alexis Deacon and Viviane Schwartz, in a different way to how a child might approach the story. However children often see details in images that text-focused adults might miss. And children often make wholly original meaning by bringing insights to the narrative from their particular vantage points. The important element - in my opinion - is that children and adults have opportunities to discuss and share their insights.

Mary is an author and educator.
Joe craig: There's no age limit on the pleasure and learning that picture books can give us
Picture books are universal. Into a few pages, some carefully crafted words and images, they distil truth. There's no age limit on that, or on the pleasure and learning that picture books can give us. The limit is on whether we choose to listen.
* Joe is a writer

Joanna Halpin: adults have a deep love and appreciation for picture books
From my experience, adults have a deep love and appreciation for picture books. Partly based on nostalgia and partly based on a genuine cultural interest. Be it the humour factor , the implicit messages or the artistic beauty.
To visit our bookstore please click here. Others' responses:

Read Jackie Morris's answer here.

Read Pam Dix's answer here

Read Vivian French's answer here.

Read SF Said's answer here

Read Emily Drabble's answer here.

Read Pippa Goodhart's answer here.

Read Nicolette Jones's answer here

Read Nicola Davies's answer here

Read John Shelley's answer here

Read Bridget Marzo's answer: here

Read Zoe Toft's answer: here

Read Ehsan Abdollahi's answer: here

Read Celestine and the Hare's answer here.

Read Frank Cattrell-Boyce's answer here.

Read Emmi Smid's answer here.

Read Tamsin Rosewell's answer here

Read Anahita Teymorian's answer here

Read Azita Rassi's answer here

Read Jessica Shepherd's answer here

Read Jill Bennett's answer here

Read Suzanne Carpenter's answer here

Read Mathew Tobin's answer here

Read Chris Meade's answer here

Read Miriam Halahmy's answer here

Read Anna Perera's answer here

Read Kenilworth books' answer here

Read Eric Heyman's answer here

Read Robyn Ridley's answer here

Read Abi Elphinstone's answer here

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We have been asking children's writers, illustrators, lecturers and journalists: 'Are picture books for children, or adults can enjoy them just as much?' Below you will find more answers: Chris Robertson: Picture books are ONLY for people whose imagination, humor, compassion, love and understanding outweigh the moments they've spent here on earth.

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Check out this lovely website - it has all kinds of great resources for readers! It is a not-for-profit organisation created by people who believe that "there is something very special about reading books. Holding them in your hands, turning the pages, catching the smell of paper old and new, marvelling at the skills of the illustrator and letting the weight of all those pages settle in your hand or on your lap – it’s an invitation to a journey that can take you anywhere."

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The Letterpress Project is a brand new not-for-profit initiative which believes that there is something very special about reading real, printed books.

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Developing Children's Critical Thinking through Picturebooks by Mary Roche

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Developing Children's Critical Thinking through Picturebooks by Mary Roche

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In this book I share how I have used picturebooks for promoting great discussions with young children, post primary and undergraduate student teachers. I present the practical aspects of using picturebooks in the classroom as well as the theoretical underpinnings. If you want to know more about using picturebooks for developing oral language, comprehension, a love of reading, critical literacy and visual literacy you might find what you're looking for here.  The book was y highly commended at the 2015 UKLA Academic Book Awards

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Megan Dowd Lambert's book is a perfect companion to Developing Children's Critical Thinking through Picturebooks. I love it.  It will get you HOOKED on picturebooks if you aren't already. Oh ...and her 'further reading' (pp 134-137) section is another excellent treasure trove for picturebook anoraks like me.

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“Everything I think is important about lovemybooks is right there in its name!”
SF Said, author

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This blog about using picturebooks for teaching and learning is well worth a read - not least because Mat recommends my book!

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Why Picturebooks matter This blog was born out of two events: a Mocksted visit...

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https://www.brainpickings.org/?mc_cid=e21bbe2fe7&mc_eid=

This site is a must for anyone interested in reading, thinking, discussing literature. There's always something fascinating and thought-provoking on it. Here's an example:

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Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933-December 28, 2004) spent a lifetime contemplating the role of writing in both the inner world of the writer and outer universe of readers, which we call culture - from her prolific essays and talks on the task of literature to her devastatingly beautiful letter to Borges to her decades of reflections on writing recorded in her diaries. But nowhere did she address the singular purpose of storytelling and the social responsibility of the writer with more piercing precision than in one of her last public appearances - a tremendous lecture on South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer titled "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning," which Sontag delivered shortly before her death in 2004. The speech is included in and lends its title to the endlessly enriching posthumous anthology At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (public library), which also gave us Sontag on beauty vs. interestingness, courage and resistance, and literature and freedom.

Sontag begins with the quintessential question asked of, and answered by, all prominent writers - to distill their most essential advice on the craft:

I'm often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: "Several things. Love words, agonize over sentences. And pay attention to the world."

Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer's virtue.

For instance: "Be serious." By which I meant: Never be cynical. And which doesn't preclude being funny.

What might Sontag say of the exponentially more exacting struggle against the cultural momentum of cynicism a mere decade later?

With the disclaimer that "descriptions mean nothing without examples," Sontag points to Gordimer as the "living writer who exemplifies all that a writer can be" and considers what the South African author's "large, ravishingly eloquent, and extremely varied body of work" reveals about the key to all great writing:

A great writer of fiction both creates - through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms - a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will.

She cautions that despite all the noble uses of literature, despite all the ways in which it can transcend the written word to achieve a larger spiritual purpose - William Faulkner's conviction that the writer's duty is "to help man endure by lifting his heart" comes to mind - storytelling is still literature's greatest duty:

The primary task of a writer is to write well. (And to go on writing well. Neither to burn out nor to sell out.) ... Let the dedicated activist never overshadow the dedicated servant of literature - the matchless storyteller.

Echoing Walter Benjamin's ideas on how storytelling transmutes information into wisdom - Sontag was a great admirer and rereader of his work - she adds:

To write is to know something. What a pleasure to read a writer who knows a great deal. (Not a common experience these days...) Literature, I would argue, is knowledge - albeit, even at its greatest, imperfect knowledge. Like all knowledge.

Still, even now, even now, literature remains one of our principal modes of understanding.

[...]

Everybody in our debauched culture invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom. There is a great deal of wisdom in Nadine Gordimer's work. She has articulated an admirably complex view of the human heart and the contradictions inherent in living in literature and in history.

Nearly half a century after E.B. White proclaimed that the writer's duty is "to lift people up, not lower them down," Sontag considers "the idea of the responsibility of the writer to literature and to society" and clarifies the terms:

By literature, I mean literature in the normative sense, the sense in which literature incarnates and defends high standards. By society, I mean society in the normative sense, too - which suggests that a great writer of fiction, by writing truthfully about the society in which she or he lives, cannot help but evoke (if only by their absence) the better standards of justice and of truthfulness that we have the right (some would say the duty) to militate for in the necessarily imperfect societies in which we live.

Obviously, I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent... This doesn't entail moralizing in any direct or crude sense. Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate - and, therefore, improve - our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

In a sentiment that calls to mind French polymath Henri Poincaré's assertion that creativity is the act of choosing the good ideas from among the bad ones, Sontag defines what a writer does and is:

Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can't tell all the stories - certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence ... in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story).

[...]

A novelist, then, is someone who takes you on a journey. Through space. Through time. A novelist leads the reader over a gap, makes something go where it was not.

[...]

Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once ... and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.

[...]

The work of the novelist is to enliven time, as it is to animate space.

Repeating her memorable assertion that criticism is "cultural cholesterol," penned in her diary decades earlier, Sontag considers the reactive indignation that passes for criticism:

Most notions about literature are reactive - in the hands of lesser talents, merely reactive.

[...]

The greatest offense now, in matters both of the arts and of culture generally, not to mention political life, is to seem to be upholding some better, more exigent standard, which is attacked, both from the left and the right, as either naïve or (a new banner for the philistines) "elitist."

Writing nearly a decade before the golden age of ebooks and some years before the epidemic of crowdsourced-everything had infected nearly every corner of creative culture, Sontag once again reveals her extraordinary prescience about the intersection of technology, society, and the arts. (Some decades earlier, she had presaged the "aesthetic consumerism" of visual culture on the social web.) Turning a critical eye to the internet and its promise - rather, its threat - of crowdsourced storytelling, she writes:

Hypertext - or should I say the ideology of hypertext? - is ultrademocratic and so entirely in harmony with the demagogic appeals to cultural democracy that accompany (and distract one's attention from) the ever-tightening grip of plutocratic capitalism.

[But the] proposal that the novel of the future will have no story or, instead, a story of the reader's (rather, readers') devising is so plainly unappealing and, should it come to pass, would inevitably bring about not the much-heralded death of the author but the extinction of the reader - all future readers of what is labeled as "literature."

Returning to the writer's crucial task of selecting what story to tell from among all the stories that could be told, Sontag points to literature's essential allure - the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life's infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one. A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility:

Every fictional plot contains hints and traces of the stories it has excluded or resisted in order to assume its present shape. Alternatives to the plot ought to be felt up to the last moment. These alternatives constitute the potential for disorder (and therefore of suspense) in the story's unfolding.

[...]

Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.

[...]

The pleasure of fiction is precisely that it moves to an ending. And an ending that satisfies is one that excludes. Whatever fails to connect with the story's closing pattern of illumination the writer assumes can be safely left out of the account.

A novel is a world with borders. For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders. One could describe the story's end as a point of magical convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a fixed position from which the reader sees how initially disparate things finally belong together.

Once again echoing Walter Benjamin's wise discrimination between storytelling and information, Sontag considers the two contrasting models "competing for our loyalty and attention":

There is an essential ... distinction between stories, on the one hand, which have, as their goal, an end, completeness, closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by definition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary.

For Sontag, these two modes of world-building are best exemplified by the dichotomy between literature and the commercial mass media. Writing in 2004, she saw television as the dominant form of the latter, but it's striking to consider how true her observations hold today if we substitute "the internet" for every mention of "television." One can only wonder what Sontag would make of our newsfeed-fetishism and our compulsive tendency to mistake the latest and most urgent for the most important. She writes:

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Literature involves. It is the re-creation of human solidarity. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances - immures us in our own indifference.

The so-called stories that we are told on television satisfy our appetite for anecdote and offer us mutually canceling models of understanding. (This is reinforced by the practice of punctuating television narratives with advertising.) They implicitly affirm the idea that all information is potentially relevant (or "interesting"), that all stories are endless - or if they do stop, it is not because they have come to an end but, rather, because they have been upstaged by a fresher or more lurid or eccentric story.

By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstopped stories, the narratives that the media relate - the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the educated public once devoted to reading - offer a lesson in amorality and detachment that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.

Indeed, this notion of moral obligation is what Sontag sees as the crucial differentiator between storytelling and information - something I too have tussled with, a decade later, in contemplating the challenge of cultivating wisdom in the age of information, particularly in a media landscape driven by commercial interest whose very business model is predicated on conditioning us to confuse information with meaning. (Why think about what constitutes a great work of art - how it moves you, what it says to your soul - when you can skim the twenty most expensive paintings in history on a site like Buzzfeed?)

Sontag, who had admonished against reducing culture to "content" half a century before the term became the currency of said commercial media, writes:

In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always ... an ethical component. This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution - which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by our media-disseminated glut of unending stories.

Television gives us, in an extremely debased and untruthful form, a truth that the novelist is obliged to suppress in the interest of the ethical model of understanding peculiar to the enterprise of fiction: namely, that the characteristic feature of our universe is that many things are happening at the same time. ("Time exists in order that it doesn't happen all at once... space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you.")

And therein lies Sontag's greatest, most timeless, most urgently timely point - for writers, and for human beings:

To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path.

To be a moral human being is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention.

When we make moral judgments, we are not just saying that this is better than that. Even more fundamentally, we are saying that this is more important than that. It is to order the overwhelming spread and simultaneity of everything, at the price of ignoring or turning our backs on most of what is happening in the world.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention - a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched.

But perhaps the beginning of wisdom, and humility, is to acknowledge, and bow one's head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding - which is also the understanding of the novelist - to take this in.

At the Same Time is an indispensable read in its entirety - an eternally nourishing serving of wisdom from one of the most expansive and luminous minds humanity ever produced. Complement it with Sontag on love, art, how polarities imprison us, why lists appeal to us, and the joy of rereading beloved books, then revisit this evolving archive of celebrated writers' advice on writing.

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Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers

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Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933-December 28, 2004) spent a lifetime contemplating the role of writing in both the inner world of the writer and outer universe of readers, which we call culture - from her prolific essays and talks on the task of literature to her devastatingly beautiful letter to Borges to her decades of reflections on writing recorded in her diaries.

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"If you love books, especially those written for children and young adults, then you are an honorary member of The Nerdy Book Club".

The website was "designed to give a home to those who wish to share the love of reading with others as well as to organize voting and announcing winners of Annual Nerdies Book Awards."

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A place where students, educators and parents can exchange and express views about the best of books, new technologies and libraries. (One of the bloggers on The Nerdy Book Club website)

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A place where students, educators and parents can exchange and express views about the best of books, new technologies and libraries.

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This blog is superb. Interviews with authors; book trailers; reviews; 'mock' Caldecott awards. Classroom teachers - you'll love this! @tMrSchuReads

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Exploring Children’s Literature through Interviews and Book Trailers

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A blog about kids' books: thoughts, recommendations & reviews. Minerva says:  "I want to discover newly published books and fling them towards children who I know will enjoy them – to rediscover old classics that can kindle a spark, feed an imagination".

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Seldom has a picture book quite embraced how I feel right now as Mole in a Black and White Hole by Tereza Sediva. With a die-cut hole on the cover into the mole's black and white house, it feels like the perfect lockdown book. Mole is first seen deep underground in his hole with a television and a book for comfort. He's clearly been in lockdown for as long as I have. His consolation is a bright pink chandelier - represented here by a vivid neon orange blob - representative in fact of a root vegetable, plugging the gap between the outside world and Mole's hole.

During the course of the book, the 'chandelier' tells Mole of all the wondrous (neon and brightly colourful) happenings above ground, until one day, the 'chandelier' disappears. Initially, it leaves a hole in Mole's heart too, as he misses his friend and the world is blacker than ever, despite the sunbeam reaching through the gap. But then Mole ventures forth, and life becomes not so black and white.

This is a beautifully executed picture book - with Mole as the expressive centrepiece to a world that proves to be full of fascination, friendship, and of course colour. Readers will take enormous pleasure from the contrast between the world below and that above - cleverly using the centrefold horizontally to draw the difference - but also from the careful layering of colour images, which interweave and seem almost transparent in their rendering. A wonderful spring awakening, and a cheerful reminder for the light at the end of every tunnel. Available for pre-order here but not published until June, I hope I can leave my black hole before then. In the meantime...

Children have found plenty of inspiration for writing during lockdowns, despite the world essentially shrinking on them, and What About Me? Said the Flea by Lily Murray and Richard Merritt is a great antidote to the idea that stories have to be about huge, powerful forces. Sometimes, the most exquisite inspiration is in the small everyday things.

This really is one of the most exciting and endearing picture books I've seen in some time. It happily marries text and pictures, with the pictures expressing beyond the story most eloquently. Sophia is trying to write a story, and looking for inspiration. All sorts of things present themselves as perfect protagonists: a bear (all good books have one apparently), a lion, a unicorn, a dinosaur, but there is also one who is jumping and squeaking to make itself heard and Sophia just can't see it. Working on both a literal and metaphorical level, this is a great idea for a picture book , allowing readers to explore the ideas of inspiration, creativity, inclusion and so much more, but it is also just extraordinarily fun.

The pictures give the game away - at first the flea is fairly well hidden, but eventually the illustrator illuminates the flea with flashing lights and arrows. And Sophia still misses it! A clever reader will also see where the flea originated!

But the pictures do more than point out the flea - they give a real testament to each animal and its personality. The animals are shown in a whole helter-skelter of scenes, from a comedy stage to a swimming pool, the ocean, a boxing ring and more. Each is also imbued with a raft of humorous elements, including a bears' picnic, and even Sophia's desk itself (which gives more than a clue as to where inspiration comes from...anywhere!)

The ending is great fun. Poor flea. Although you'll be delighted to hear that this author/illustrator pairing aren't the first to focus on a flea. Samson the Mighty Flea by Angela McAllister and Nathan Reed would make a delightful companion book. There is a use to fleas after all. And What About Me? Said the Flea, available here, is a triumph.

Perhaps when children do go back to school, they'll once again go on school trips. If not, then at least they can relive one in Luna Loves Art by Joseph Coelho and Fiona Lumbers. We first met Luna in Luna Loves Library Day but this picture book nicely captures a school trip to an art gallery with our exuberant, enthusiastic protagonist.

Luna is joyful to be in the art gallery, but classmate Finn doesn't seem sure. In fact, he seems sad. Can Luna have an excellent day out, but also make Finn smile?

The illustrations here are observational and meticulously crafted - each child with their own unique personality, each person reacting differently to each painting in the art gallery, and cleverly, the paintings are all neat picture book reproductions of real art from Malevich's Black Square to Moore's sculpture to Henri Rousseau. Luna feels as if the sunflowers in the Van Gogh painting are alive because the painting is so thick - and the flowers burst out of the frame in Lumbers' rendering. Luna warns Finn not to touch, and this is a wonderful evocation of the visceral quality of the paintings, as well as the very human reaction of Luna - wanting to do no wrong.

Not only is this a wonderful introduction to the power and beauty of art, and the excitement of a school trip (although both I and my test audience were very worried that the children in the story didn't stop for lunch or a toilet break, key features of our own school trips), but it is also a lovely story of both family and friend dynamics.

The art installation page is glorious, but full marks to Luna's teacher, who lets the class loose in the gift shop! You can buy your own gift here.

Lastly, and by no means least - all four of these picture books are worth purchasing immediately - is The Perfect Fit by Naomi and James Jones. For the youngest children, beginning to make sense of the world and their place within it, and also beginning to recognise first shapes, colours and patterns, this is a pleasing story about a winsome triangle attempting to fit in with others.

Triangle has fun with the circles, but she doesn't roll with them. She likes the squares but stacking is hard. So, she sets off to find others more like her. By the end, of course, she realises that being in a diverse group of shapes is actually the most fun.

The Jones pairing make a fabulous fit in this book, consolidating the ideas in both text and image, placing single sentences in a variety of spaces, slanting up and down or centred in the middle of the page, to fit with the images that tell the story too. And the images are simple - shapes coloured in primary and secondary colours, either coming together, or leaving white spaces between to explore what fits and what doesn't.

Just as children make images from geometric shapes, so does the illustrator here. My children and I used to do this with felt shapes. Here, a boat is made from two squares, a simple black line, and a triangle sail. An ice cream is formed from a hexagon on top of an upside-down triangle, the flake drawn in simple black lines.

Of course, there are various underlying messages. We might be individual shapes, but we all want to come together as a group - it's more fun. (From lockdown, we now know how much we are missing other people in all their shapes and sizes). But also, this is about inclusion. An array of shapes makes for a more diverse and interesting set of patterns. Four yellow triangles aren't nearly as fun to play with as a green hexagon, a blue circle, a red square and a yellow triangle. Looking and acting the same aren't always necessary.

But also, and more subliminally, is the message of a shared sense of purpose. The different shapes need to work together to collectively create a new shape, to form an image, to play.

This is a simply executed, yet positive and clever book. A narrative story running through, personifying a shape who's lost their tribe, but then the welcoming spirit of other tribes, and the coming together of all. You can buy it here.
With thanks to Thames and Hudson, Buster Books, OUP, and Andersen Press for the review copies.

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MinervaReads - kids’ books: thoughts, recommendations & reviews

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kids’ books: thoughts, recommendations & reviews

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Lots and lots of great stuff here. Reviews of children's books and oodles of interesting articles - enough to keep you browsing for ages!

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This is a lovely and informative blog with lots about all kinds of children's books including picturebooks. The blog's creator says of herself:  I am based in the South West of England, I am a school librarian by profession, a mum of two, and I have a personal interest in children’s literature, with particular interests in picture books and teen fiction.

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Bountiful picture book reviews, TOP SECRET previews, sneak peeks, author interviews and more!!! @maybeswabey

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To celebrate being part of this fabulous blog tour Little Sniffer and I decided to make a picnic tea inspired by some of the things we spotted in Sun the latest seasonal delight from illustrator and author Sam Usher.

The first little chap to catch our eye was the charming little green parrot on the front cover. With his delightful green plumage and perky yellow beak he leant himself perfectly to a fabulously fruity Crudités creation!

We collected together as many different coloured fruits and vegetables as we could find and made this technicolour treat! complete with mango beak, pepper plumage, a nectarine tummy, apple face and a tiny black bean for an eye, as you can see he's perched quite magnificently on a strange branch of basil. Mini Sniffers verdict, a BIG thumbs up.

And now for something a bit more substantial!

Next to catch our eye this groovy looking chimp. Immediately we had a "Monkey Bun" in mind. So we set to work chopping snipping and shaping all of our favourite ingredients and fashioning them in to what I think you will agree is a rather marvellous looking sandwich!

Olives for nostrils, eggs for eyes (with obligatory black bean pupils) BIG green cucumber ears, a pepper mouth with a goofy ham tongue.... all in all quite unexpectedly delicious.

Now for Little Monkey's favourite part of any meal, picnic or otherwise.

Time of pudding! We were quite taken by the magnificent glittering sandcastle on the cover and Little Sniffer is unusually partial to jelly so we made a passionfruit jelly pot complete with sand made from crunched up biscuits.

I hardly had time to photograph this particular component of our picnic as it was gobble up in a flash.

We have always been huge fans of this beautifully illustrated series of picture books, first the wintery delight which was Snow, then the atmospheric triumph which was Rain and now a scorching celebration of sunshine Sun.

Sun is nothing short of a triumph, beaming with illustrative charm and unashamedly revelling in traditional storytelling with nothing but joy and adventure at it's core. I always delight in the beautiful intuitive depiction of the relationship between a boy and his grandfather in these books and this one in particular radiates love and friendship at it's most pure. The gentle evolution of the story is told so cleverly by at first the most subtle of detail, gently unfolding as heat parched landscapes dominate the pages. You'll never guess who boy and his grandfather unexpectedly chance upon.

Hold on to your sun hats the almost unbelievable adventure which is about to unfold...

CHECK OUT THE OTHER STOPS WITH OUR BLOGGER CHUMS

FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK.

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With my stubby typing paws I will review the best picture books the world has to offer! Hold on to your hats for a world of book sniffing, guest author features, top illustrators, hot off the press new titles and general matters of a picture book nature.

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Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks 

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Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks 

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Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks examines several unconventional and non-conformist picturebooks, considering what they are, their audience and their purpose.

I haven't read it yet (currently on order from Routledge) but if it is anything like Evans' former body of work it will be really well worth reading!

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I like this blog. It is exactly what it says on the homepage - 'a blog about brilliant children's books'. Lots of great reviews and information about new books and old favourites alike. There are interviews with authors too: see this one with Pat Hutchins: http://tygertale.com/2015/06/09/rosies-chick-pat-hutchins-qa/

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Welcome to tygertale, a blog about brilliant children's books. It's a subject that just so happens to coincide with the thing I am currently avoiding - writing a children's book.

Tygertale is named after the children's book I'm writing, a comic sort-of sci fi adventure thing (nice pitch). The lead character Tyger is a bad girl in the scurrilous tradition of Pippi Longstocking, Beryl the Peril and Marmalade Atkins.

It's also the name of those fantastic balloons that whizz around the room, screaming.

My day job is producing arts documentaries (or 'films' as we grandly call them) and writing proposals. These lovingly crafted treatments are read by an audience of up to four very important people. So not much different to this blog then. Here I am doing my job, talking to the children's laureate Chris Riddell in his garden. You can see more from his laureate's log here.

The other images are taken from one of the children's books that saved my life, Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop, one of the first books I learnt to read. Or is that learned to read? Either way, I'm still learning to write.

The rights of all images on the site belong to the authors /publishers / estates / whatever, and not me. Any objections please let me know and I'll take them down, to be replaced with crude copies produced by my children.

If you'd like to contact me leave a comment here or find on twitter

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Welcome to tygertale, a blog about brilliant children's books. It's a subject that just so happens to coincide with the thing I am currently avoiding - writing a children's book. Tygertale is named after the children's book I'm writing, a comic sort-of sci fi adventure thing (nice pitch).

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Each Monday, The Classroom Bookshelf posts an entry on a recently published book for children or young adults. Each entry includes three sections: Book Review, Teaching Invitations, and Further Explorations.

Readers can browse the archive or search for specific picturebooks.

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The blog that used to be here is now at http://www.theclassroombookshelf.com/.

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Up and Away: Using Picture Books by Wendy Michaels and Maureen Walsh

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Up and Away: Using Picture Books by Wendy Michaels and Maureen Walsh

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Up and Away presents both a convincing rationale and a clear framework for using picture books at the secondary level, based on a developmental model of reader response.

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Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter compiled by Leonard S Marcus

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Show Me a Story: Why Picture Books Matter compiled by Leonard S Marcus

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Leonard S. Marcus speaks with twenty-one of the world’s most celebrated authors and illustrators, and asks about their childhood, their inspiration, their determination, their mentors, their creative choices, and more. <br>

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Picturebooks and Literary Understanding in Honour of Lawrence Sipe edited by Margaret Mackey

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Picturebooks and Literary Understanding in Honour of Lawrence Sipe edited by Margaret Mackey

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Larry Sipe's untimely death in 2011 was an irreplaceable loss to the world of literary scholarship . The articles in this collection in his honour include a study of a single picturebook, a report on young people's responses to a different picturebook, and two projects to incorporate actual responses from children into more broadly theoretical perspectives.

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Listening In. Children Talk about Books (and other things)  by Thomas Newkirk with Patricia McLure

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Listening In. Children Talk about Books (and other things)  by Thomas Newkirk with Patricia McLure

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Listening In is the story of Newkirk's weekly visits to McLure's 1st and 2nd grade classroom where he observed and listened as children discussed books. As he learned about the rich oral tradition of the children he realised that children interpret texts in their own language, through their own culture, and connect literature to their everyday lives.

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Reading Otherways developed from Lissa Paul's experience  of working with students as they begin to apply critical thinking to children's books. This is yet another Thimble Press resource.

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Learning to Read with Picture Books by Jill Bennett

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Learning to Read with Picture Books by Jill Bennett

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Another Thimble Press gem - this books is an annotated list of picture books (somewhat dated now but still useful) based on Jill's 12 years' experience of helping children to read using 'real' texts - appropriate and interesting picture books.

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The Book Club Connection: Literacy Learning and Classroom Talk edited by S. McMahon & T. Raphael

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The Book Club Connection: Literacy Learning and Classroom Talk edited by S. McMahon & T. Raphael

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This is a comprehensive text about the beliefs, issues, and practices at the forefront of literacy education–language, ethnic, and academic diversity; authentic assessment; social construction of meaning and knowledge–explored through the lens of a cohesive instructional design, the Book Club Program. As such, it provides a well-researched pedagogical model.

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Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature  by Alison Lurie

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Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature  by Alison Lurie

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“The great subversive works of children's literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy, and act as a force for change. This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.”   Alison Lurie,

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Should We Burn Babar? challenges some of the chestnuts of children’s literature. Highlighting instances of racism, sexism, and condescension that detract from the tales being told, Kohl provides strategies for detecting bias in stories written for young people and suggests ways to teach kids to think critically about what they read.

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Teaching Visual Literacy edited by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher

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Teaching Visual Literacy edited by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher

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This book by a team of literacy experts offers classroom teachers a guide to using visual forms of information as tools for literacy   development. The authors provide strategies for fostering visual and critical literacy competencies and increasing student engagement through the use of picture books, comic books, graphic novels, traditional films, anime, and other visual sources of information.

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A Primer of Visual Literacy by Donis A. Dondis

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A Primer of Visual Literacy by Donis A. Dondis

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This primer is designed to teach students the interconnected arts of visual communication. It is described as 'a beginning text for art and design students and a basic text for all other students; those who do not intend to become  artists or designers but who need to acquire the essential skills of understanding visual communication at a time when so much information is being studied and transmitted in non-verbal modes, especially through photography and film'.

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A Family of Readers by Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano

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A Family of Readers by Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano

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Roger Sutton and Martha V. Parravano, editors at the HORN BOOK magazine, offer thoughtful essays that consider how books are read to (and then by) young people. They invite such leading authors and artists as Maurice Sendak, Katherine Paterson, Margaret Mahy, and Jon Scieszka, as well as a selection of top critics, to add their voices about the genres they know best. The result is a great readers’ companion to everything from wordless board books to the most complex and daring young adult novels

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Communication, Language and Literacy from Birth to Five by Avril Brock and Carolynn Rankin

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Communication, Language and Literacy from Birth to Five by Avril Brock and Carolynn Rankin

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This book is helpful for educators in birth-to-five settings who wish to strengthen their language and literacy programme. The book would also appeal to parents looking for ways to support language and literacy learning at home. It includes sections on using picturebooks in early years' settings.

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Children's Books Ireland @KidsBooksIrel 

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Children's Books Ireland @KidsBooksIrel 

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CBI is the national children’s books organisation of Ireland. Through their many activities and events they aim to engage young people with books, foster a greater understanding of the importance of books for young people and act as a core resource for those with an interest in books for children in Ireland. They have a great magazine in which reviews of picturebooks feature quite often.  http://www.childrensbooksireland.ie/inis

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LearnEnglish Kids is the British Council's website for children who are learning English as a second or foreign language.

This site has free resources for children to use at home, either independently or with family members or friends. The resources have been created and developed by teachers and professionals who work with children who are learning English.

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Another nice site for learning more about using picturebooks.

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The Beauty of Picture Books Website and blog were created to foster continual awareness about the power of picture books to inspire a love of reading, develop critical reading and thinking skills, and create special moments of learning, love and wonder. Our blog hosts cont

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On Teaching Reading by Sinead Gaffeney @shinpad1 

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On Teaching Reading by Sinead Gaffeney @shinpad1 

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Directly from the chalk face - a sensible and balanced approach to literacy

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An updated version: Many thanks to @gazneedle and @marygtroche for their comments. There is an apocryphal Irishman much loved of sermon-givers and blog-writers. When asked for directions, he scratches his head and says 'Well now, if I were you, I wouldn't start from here'. If only that were possible.

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In 2011 a group of independent professional children's authors, based in the UK and Ireland, created the Picture Book Den to share their passion for picture books. Here it is

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Dr Sarah Mitchell (GP) and I met through our professional interest in bereavement. I was researching for, and writing, a fictional picture book about child bereavement, and Sarah was conducting doctoral research on palliative care in children. We were both keenly aware of people's reluctance to talk about death -within medical settings and in society in general, and we both wanted to encourage picture book use as a way to talk about what, for so many people, can be a difficult subject to confront.

Through many searches and leads, we tracked down all the picture books we could find about death and bereavement (including self- and charity- published books, and from many different countries -although only ones that have been translated into English). We found more than forty and from these, we came up with a recommended list of twenty one books (that at least one of us recommends).

Our final selection from all the books we were able to find.

Sarah, welcome to the blog. Given our different backgrounds, we've chosen books for slightly different reasons. Can you tell us how you made your choices?

Clare: We're going to include these books first in order to make it as practically useful to bereaved and pre-bereaved families and children as possible, and for other doctors and bereavement practitioners who may be interested. I, too, chose each of the ones you included (though sometimes for different reasons). But I've chosen some others, too. There are some wonderful picture books that explore death and I feel that it would be extremely beneficial for these books to be much more widely shared (some with careful parental or adult supervision) with young people who are not bereaved but who may later find death and bereavement less frightening and isolating when they are inevitably confronted with it at some point. If reading these books encourages discussions about death that feel safe rather than terrifying then we as a society and as individuals will do better when dealing with our own bereavements and reaching out to others who are bereaved.
Sarah, GP: I agree. Death and dying are subjects that most of us would rather avoid. The emotions that they bring are tough to face. But death affects us all, and in my work as a GP I frequently witness the impact it has on those who have been bereaved or have a loved one who is dying. When a patient comes in to a GP's consulting room, it is rarely immediately obvious that the reason for their attendance is the distress associated with death or bereavement. But if we are in a position to take the time and make the effort to look beyond whatever physical symptom is presented, the headache, or the vertigo, or the abdominal pain, we will frequently find death and bereavement lurking in the background with all of the emotions that they bring.

GPs refer to this as "the hidden agenda". In my experience, the consultation is most effective once the hidden agenda has been found. Only then can we respond in a way that is the most therapeutic and responsive to the patient's needs. What can be difficult is that there is no easy fix - we cannot prescribe a drug that will relieve a person's distress related to a bereavement; there is no surgery to take away the part that hurts. What we can do is listen, and if we are able to provide resources to patients and family members, these can be useful not only for people who wish to discuss death and bereavement with children, but also for people who are struggling with it themselves, encouraging reflection and discussion that may otherwise be hard to address.
Clare: Wouldn't it be wonderful if books on death and bereavement were read and discussed widely by children and adults alike, and that it helped break down the 'hidden agenda' because people were no longer so afraid of death itself and could talk more openly about how it is impacting our lives...

Is Daddy Coming Back in a Minute? by Elke and Alex Barber and Anna Jarvis (Jessica Kingsley, 2016).

Sarah, GP: This book is based on Elke and Alex Barber's experience of the sudden death of Alex's father when Alex was three years old. It addresses the permanence of death and the emotions Alex experienced, the questions that he had, and how in time, they came to accept that feeling happy and sad at the same time is possible. This book is followed up by "What Happened to Daddy's Body?" (Elke and Alex Barber and Anna Jarvis, Jessica Kingsley, 2016)

which provides a practical account of funeral customs and rituals to help children to understand.

Clare: I feel that Is Daddy Coming Back in a Minute? is so needed. It's an incredibly frank retelling of the death and what happens after, but the frankness is set within the context of such love between the mother and her child that the book feels extremely comforting at the same time. It's beautifully written and illustrated and I suspect it's one that a parent will read many times with their young child after a bereavement.

And what I really like about the follow-up, What Happened to Daddy's Body? is that the practical account of what happens (which is so honest and straightforward) is set against a backdrop of Alex's life. The end of the story takes place a couple of years after his father's death and we see that his mother is now with a new partner who "is not my daddy, but he is very funny and I like him a lot". We see the new blended family as an accepted thing without it being a major part of the story.

(c) Elke Barber, Alex Barber and Anna Jarvis (2016)

The Scar by Charlotte Moundlic and Olivier Tallec (Walker, 2011).

(c) Olivier Tallac (2011)
Sarah, GP: The Scar provides an account from a child's perspective of the emotions experienced while his mother is dying and after she has died, including sadness, anger, worry and abandonment. He tries very hard not to forget his mother and feels both physical and emotional pain. One day he falls over and grazes his knee, and hears his mother's voice comforting him, so he keeps scratching the graze to prevent it from healing. As long as there is blood he will hear his mother's voice. When Grandma comes to visit, she explains that Mum is still in his heart which he can feel beating. In time the pain becomes a bit less bad, and the scar heals. The book is illustrated mainly in red, reflecting the blood and the distress the child experiences.

(c) Charlotte Moundlic and Olivier Tallec (2011)

Clare: I love this book (translated from French). With just three characters (the boy, his father and his grandmother) illustrated throughout the book, with a very reduced -but bold choice of- colour palette by the wonderful Olivier Tallec, and with the story told first person present tense, this feels very intimate, and again, full of love.

(c) Charlotte Moundlic and Olivier Tallec (2011)

Sarah, GP: Missing Mummy is a shorter, concise and emotional story of the sadness, anger and worry that can be experienced by young children following the death of a parent. Told from the perspective of a young child whose mother has died, it addresses the permanence of death and that the child must not blame him or herself.

Clare: The child in the story is very young and the book appears deceptively (though beautifully) simply written and illustrated. But it is really powerful in what is said and not said by the child (once again, as with all the books mentioned so far, it's told from the first person).

The Fix-It Man by Dimity Powell and Nicky Johnston (EK Books, 2017)

(c) Nicky Johnston (2017)

Sarah, GP: Dad is good at fixing things, but Mama is very unwell and not "fixable". It's beautifully illustrated with pictures of family life with Mama at home, and later in bed as she is dying. It is incredibly sad when Mama dies, and the pages of the book become dark and gloomy.

(c) Nicky Johnston (2017)

The daughter worries that her dad is breaking. She has a teddy bear called Tiger who is also broken, but who in the end Dad agrees to help fix. As they start to fix things together again, the illustrations become more colourful.

(c) Nicky Johnston (2017)

Clare: This is a very recent Australian book that I'd never come across on sites about bereavement but I found recently on a Twitter search. I felt that it cleverly focuses on the relationship between the daughter and her father although we can see her mother in the background clearly still a part of a loving relationship between the three of them.

(c) Dimity Powell and Nicky Johnston (2017)

(c) Dimity Powell and Nicky Johnston (2017)
It's beautiful (the text and the pictures) and uplifting with love bursting through each page, even during a time of desperate sadness.

Samantha Jane's Missing Smile by Julie Kaplow and Donna Pincus and Beth Spiegel (Magination Press, 2007; part of the American Psychological Association).

Sarah, GP: Sammy Jane's father has died and she has stopped smiling. Her neighbour, Mrs Cooper, encourages her to come and pick berries in the garden as she has always done, and tells her that crying is ok. They use a twig floating on a pond to demonstrate how if we try to push feelings down, they rise up again. Mrs Cooper and Sammy write a letter that helps her to talk to her mum about the way she feels. The book is written by bereavement practitioners and published by the American Psychological Association and includes practical notes for parents.

Cry, Heart, But Never Break by Glenn Ringtved and Charlotte Pardi, translated by Robert Moulthrop (Enchanted Lion, 2016; originally published in Denmark, 2001)

(c) Charlotte Pardi (2001)

Sarah, GP: Death comes to the house where the children live with their grandmother, who is dying. The children try to keep Death away from her through the night by offering him coffee. In order to help the children understand why their grandmother must die, he tells a story about Grief and Joy, and Sorrow and Delight, how they couldn't live without each other, and how the same applies to life and death. The children aren't sure they have fully understood but somehow know that Death is right, so are able to say goodbye to their grandmother. The book is accessible to children of all ages.

Clare: I chose this book, too, but as a general book about death that I felt would possibly appeal as much (or more) to adults as to children. But I know that you've also used it successfully in discussions with non-bereaved children of mostly junior age (eight to elevens).

Always and Forever by Debi Gliori and Alan Durant (Picture Corgi, 2004)

Dr Sarah: This is a useful book for very young children. Otter, Mole, Fox and Hare are a happy family, but Fox gets old and dies. The others experience sadness but are eventually able to think about all of the happy things that help them to remember Fox.

Clare: I agree. I chose this, too, but again, for the general section. It's one of the few books with anthropomorphised animal characters that we chose (four of the twenty one books). What I like about this one is that it feels very human. The family (made up of different animal characters) live in a house and do human activities, and they are essentially human. So this is a gentle way of approaching bereavement for young children. This book works in a way that is useful for children whether or not they have been bereaved, and Alan Durant and Debi Gliori fill the book with love and comfort, even when dealing with tricky subjects.

Benny's Hat by Juliet Clare Bell and Dave Gray (Pomelo Press, 2017)

Sarah, GP: Benny is a big brother and the book is written in the voice of his younger sister, Friz. She realises Benny is becoming ill when she starts to beat him at arm wrestling. Benny has to go to hospital but he still loves the things he used to love, including the rain. He becomes increasingly unwell, weaker and in the illustrations, loses his hair. Mum and Dad are tired and there are times when Friz feels ignored. The hospital visits become more frequent, it becomes clear that Benny is not going to get better, and then he dies. The book includes details that I have not seen in other books, including Friz's tactics to cope with Benny's deterioration, and the symptoms and signs that he is dying. The book also includes a children's hospice, where Benny goes to stay and where he eventually chooses to go to be cared for at the end of his life, and there is a description of his funeral. The anguish that the family experience is clear in both the words and the pictures.

Clare: We were able to be more open about aspects of dying and death than some traditionally published books because we'd received Arts Council Funding to research and write the book. The application was based partly on the fact that it would free us up to create something more open than might normally be published traditionally about death. And we got a lot of feedback from bereaved and pre-bereaved young people to ensure that it still felt suitable for children and young people.

Ben's Flying Flowers by Inger Maier and Maria Bogade (Magination Press, 2012; part of American Psychological Association)

(c) Maria Bogade (2012)

Sarah, GP: Ben is three and is very sick with a serious illness. Emily is his big sister, and she is seven years old. They like to play with butterflies (flying flowers), so Emily makes Ben a butterfly pillow for his fourth birthday and he takes it with him everywhere - his "very own flying flower". Ben becomes more unwell, sleeps a lot, has to go to hospital a lot and eventually becomes too tired even for hugs. When Ben dies, the family hurt, a lot. Emily feels angry at first, and draws pictures with dark clouds and rain. In time the sad feelings start to grow a bit smaller, but sometimes she still cries and cries. Strategies that help Emily to come to terms with her feelings include snuggles with Mum and Dad and talking to grown-ups.Also published by The American Psychological Association.

Clare: What I like about Ben's Flying Flowers is that the illustrations show normal happy family scenes even though we know, almost from the start, that Ben is already very sick. And it's set over quite a long time so we get to see the siblings together before Ben dies and we feel Emily's pain, but then over time we see how she starts to come to terms with Ben's death.

I Miss My Sister by Sarah Courtauld and Holly Surplice (Child Bereavement Charity, 2009)

Sarah, GP: Published by Child Bereavement Charity, this book is designed to help children with the bereavement of a sibling and includes notes for parents. It is based around the death of a child, and describes her sister's emotional responses, including crying, feeling sick, not being able to sleep and wanting to be far away. Sometimes there are no words that can describe how she feels. There is an emphasis on practical tasks that could help. The family make a memory box and plant a garden on the birthday of the child who has died. Watching the garden grow acknowledges that the child will never be forgotten.

Clare: I like this book, too. It's simple and shorter (and smaller) than a typical picture book (and is saddle stitch), set over many years to show how she is able to move on in time.

Bereavement of a friend:
Brodie by Joy Cowley and Chris Mousdale (Walker Books, Australia, 2013 -originally, Scholastic, New Zealand, 2001)

Sarah, GP: This is a helpful book for any child or young person (or teacher) who is experiencing a friend from school becoming unwell and dying. Brodie is sick, but he still likes to draw pictures of planes and helicopters and dreams of becoming a pilot. The class think he will get better, and make cards for Brodie. Brodie tells the child narrator that he might die. Although he manages to return to school, it is not long before he is back in hospital and this time, he dies. The class don't believe the news at first, but then the teacher starts to cry, some of the class start to cry, some howl, some stare and the narrator says "it seemed I wasn't crying for Brodie, but for myself because I hurt so much inside". There are a number of theories about where Brodie has gone and an illustration that refers to different religious beliefs. The class write to the family, and although the hurt doesn't go away, it does get smaller.

Clare: This is another book that didn't come up in early searches and I was really pleased to discover it recently. Told in first person (as with the majority of the books we selected that are aimed at bereaved children, rather than a broader market), the story feels authentic and heartfelt, though simple. The illustration style is interesting, too.

(c) Chris Mousdale (2001)

Clare: And if I can just add another practical choice, before we move onto the general recommendations, I'd include The Copper Tree by Hilary Robinson and Mandy Stanley (Strauss House Productions, 2012).

(c) Mandy Stanley (2012)
It's a story about a class of young children (probably five/six-year-olds) whose teacher gets sick and dies. Teachers often play such an important role in the life of young children and I believe that this would be a comforting book to have in schools where a teacher has died.

Recommended for children and families whether or not the child is bereaved.

The Dead Bird by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Christian Robinson (Harper Collins, International edition, 2016; first published in 1938, illustrated by Remy Charlip)

Clare: You know when you discover a book that you feel you should have known all your life and you're desperate to tell everyone? Well this is one of those books. It was first published eighty years ago (!) and has recently been re-illustrated beautifully and simply, by Christian Robinson. I feel like it should just be a staple of everyone's childhood and is so matter of fact about the death of the bird and the sadness around it, and yet so beautiful in its simplicity. It starts:

"The bird was dead when the children found it."

(c) Margaret Wise Brown and Christian Robinson (2016)

and it tells us how the children gave it a funeral, like adults do. They sing to it and bury it and put flowers on the tiny grave "And they cried because their singing was so beautiful and the ferns smelled to sweetly and the bird was dead.

(c) Margaret Wise Brown and Christian Robinson (2016)

"And every day, until they forgot, they went to sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave."

(c) Margaret Wise Brown and Christian Robinson (2016)

The "every day, until they forgot" is one of my favourite ever lines in a picture book. It's a wonderful story of death being a part of life, but in an extremely safe setting. I am very grateful for the foresight of the team who chose to re-illustrate and reissue this book for a new audience.

No Matter What by Debi Gliori (Bloomsbury, 1999. UK version -not the US version or the board book version)

Clare: This has long been a picture book that I love. The story is about unconditional love and Small, who is in a bad mood, keeps challenging Large, his parent, about whether he'd still be loved by Large if he became increasingly scary creatures. The response is the same: "Of course," said Large "[Bug...or Bear] or not, I'll always love you no matter what". And at the end, he asks about whether that love would carry on after death... Large talks about stars and how many of the stars we see are already dead. The story finished with "Still they shine in the evening skies, Love, like starlight, never dies." It's a beautifully written and illus trated book and shows so wonderfully the power of unconditional love. It's a book that we put in the grave with my mother when she died (she had read it many, many times with her numerous grandchildren) and it was a real comfort.

Note, this is the UK version of the book. In the US version, all mention of death has been removed (as with the board book version). So any Americans who are keen to get hold of it need to order the UK version.

Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch (Gecko Press, 2008, translated by Catherine Chidgey; originally published in German in 2007)

Clare: This book feels like a work of art, and my guess is that it may well appeal even more to adults than it does to children, which I sometimes feel uncomfortable about with picture books, but not here. I am just so glad that this book exists. It's quirky and poignant, showing the tender relationship between Duck and Death for the last part of Duck's life. We see Duck trying to warm up Death after they've been in the pond...

and a playful side to Death, suggesting they hang out in a tree...

as well as an 'almost a little moved' Death after Duck has died...

Definitely one for adult picture book lovers but also good to share with older children.

The Bear and the Wildcat by Kazumi Yumoto and Komako Sakai (translated by Cathy Hirano; Gecko Press, 2011 -New Zealand, but originally published in 2008 in Japan)

After the death of his friend, Bird, and some poor advice from his remaining friends, Bear falls into a depression and stays away from everyone and everything for a long time.

(c) Kazumi Yumoto and Komaki Sakai (2008)

Eventually, he goes out and meets someone new with whom he can share the story of his friendship with the bird. And after having buried the bird, he is able to move on.

This is so beautifully illustrated, and unusual for a picture book, in black and white, with tiny bits of pink added in towards the end, and I think the appeal of this may well be for adults and older children, but I really love it.

Harry and Hopper by Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood (Scholastic 2009; originally published by an Australian imprint)

(c) Freya Blackwood (2009)

This is a story about Harry, a boy who lives with his father, and Harry's dog, Hopper. There is an undertone of Harry's loneliness and Harry and Hopper are extremely close.

(c) Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood (2009)
When Hopper dies in a road accident, the suddenness makes it extremely hard for Harry to accept

and it takes a while (and some dream-like encounters with Hopper, and a kind, devoted father) before Harry finally starts coming to terms with Hopper's death and is able to say goodbye. It's suitable for younger and older children alike, and for those who have experienced the death of a pet and want comforting, and those who just want to read a story and who are open to other people's experiences.

The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers (Harper Collins, 2010)

Told in the same, simple, understated way that Oliver Jeffers books so often are, The Heart in the Bottle tells the story of a curious, engaged and loving girl who shuts herself off after the death of her beloved grandfather. Using expert visual storytelling, the grandfather is never even mentioned and yet we see how fear of exposing herself to the risk of being hurt that badly again means that she lives only a half-life (even into adulthood), until she finally lets herself become close to another person, a small, curious child much like her earlier self. Although the pictures and words are really simple, given the reliance on a metaphor of keeping her heart in a bottle, this may appeal even more to older children and adults (or for younger children who have engaged in discussion about the story with an adult).

Michael Rosen's Sad Book by Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake (Walker, 2004)

(c) Quentin Blake (2004)

This unusual and heart-breaking picture book became an almost instant classic as soon as it was out. It was written after the sudden death of Michael Rosen's son Eddie. Quentin Blake was the perfect illustrator for the book, someone who had illustrated Eddie over the years alongside Michael Rosen's poems about him.

(c) Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake (2004)

I doubt that Michael Rosen wrote this book aiming it at children. It is at times bleaker than almost any picture book I've read, and the ending feels bleak, too, almost unheard of in picture books.

(c) Michael Rosen and Quentin Blake (2004)
It is certainly not without hope but it is a very honest and shockingly personal adult account of the utter desperation felt after a terrible bereavement.

It is hard to read this book as an adult but that should not put anyone off. And likewise, it should not put people off sharing it with an older child. It would be worth reading it carefully first before sharing it though, so you are ready to discuss any aspect of it that might come up. I think it could be extremely useful to read it with an older child who has experienced a parent going through bereavement so that they can talk about how bereavement affects adults as well as children.
My Father's Arms Are A Boat by Stein Erik Lunde and Oyvind Torseter (Enchanted Lion Books, 2013, translated by Kari Dickson; originally published in Norway in 2008)

(c) Oyvind Torseter (2013)

Clare: This is a book that captures one night in the life of a bereaved son and father, in their isolated house some time after the death of the boy's mother. Neither of them can sleep and the father carries the boy out into the snow (hence the title My Father's Arms Are a Boat). This is a poetic book with unusual, arresting images

(c) Stein Erik Lunde and Oyvind Torseter (2013)

(c) Stein Erik Lunde and Oyvind Torseter (2013)

and although it's written in the first person, the voice sounds older and more sophisticated than a boy of his age is likely to sound. But I am totally willing to suspend my disbelief on this count because of its beauty and the powerful atmosphere it evokes. As with some of the other books, I feel that it is one that adults in particular will be drawn to but I would still recommend it to an older bereaved child (to be read with an adult) as there is definitely a feeling that things will, in time, be ok for them and that they will make it through, together.

Clare: Some books we didn't include even though they could be useful after a bereavement. There are wonderful books that tackle depression or isolation which could be interpreted as being in the wake of a bereavement. For example, I've always assumed that 'The Storm Whale' by Benji Davies is a book about bereavement and it shows beautifully the isolation and parental depression that can follow bereavement, but it never mentions the death of the mother; it is just clear that Noi lives in an isolated place with his father (the mother may have just left). So we didn't include these books (though I would certainly recommend it to children, whether they are bereaved or not). Similarly, there were other books that clearly were about death and coming to terms with it that never mentioned death but only euphemisms (eg 'disappeared'). Since we are interested in breaking down the taboo of talking about death, we deliberately chose only to include books that were clearly acknowledging death whether or not the parent reader chose to articulate it. Sarah, were there any other books that you didn't include that you felt would be helpful?

Sarah, GP: There are a number of books that are more practical that aren't really picture books, unlike What Happened to Daddy's Body? which we included and is practical but also a story. "What Does Dead Mean?" and a workbook entitled "When Somebody Has a Very Serious Illness" are useful resources to help answer questions that children may have. The language is simple and matter of fact. Also, b ooks that I would like to see published are those with illustrations and advice that would be important to people from ethnic minority backgrounds. And so far there are no books about a child dying in an intensive care unit, which is currently the most common place of death for the (thankfully relatively small) number of children who die.
Clare: Sarah, thank you so much for joining me in creating this blog post. I've learnt a lot from looking at these books from the point of view of a medical professional.

I'm sure that there are readers of this blog who would choose to include different picture books on this list and we'd love to hear from anyone about books that they have found useful. Please feel free to leave a comment, below.
Many thanks, Clare and Sarah.
Juliet Clare Bell's latest picture book is Benny's Hat (illustrated by Dave Gray) which follows a young girl, Friz, as her big brother gets sick and then dies. www.pomelopip.com and www.julietclarebell.com. Please note, Dr Sarah Mitchell was not encouraged to include Benny's Hat in the review above. It is one of the books that she recommends to bereaved and pre-bereaved families.

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Dr Sarah Mitchell (GP) and I met through our professional interest in bereavement. I was researching for, and writing, a fictional picture book about child bereavement, and Sarah was conducting doctoral research on palliative care in children.

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I would define this as the first book any teacher should read if they want to understand the power of picturebooks. It's very simple to access and almost a gentle guide in. It brushes lightly on characterisation, setting and themes in picturebooks and how we read these differently to novels. Read this alongside Mary Roche's 'Developing Critical Thinking' and your pupils will thank you for all time!

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Always worth a browse!

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Marlon Bundo: booksellers furious over decision to launch on Amazon

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Did you know that there's a website where you can watch famous actors read their favourite picturebooks aloud? It's right here!

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Some great ideas and resources here for picturebook enthusiasts

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International Literacy Initiative Celebrating the Print Picture Book in November

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Dialogic Readers: Children talking and thinking together about visual texts by Fiona Maine

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Dialogic Readers: Children talking and thinking together about visual texts by Fiona Maine

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Dialogic Readers: Children talking and thinking together about visual texts highlights the potential for talk between readers as a tool for critical and creative thinking. It proposes a new dialogic theory of reading comprehension that incorporates multi-modal media and adds further weight to the argument that talk as a tool for learning should form a central part of primary classroom learning and teaching.

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A great website for finding out about professional development in literacy.

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CLPE | Centre for Literacy in Primary Education

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Create a free CLPE account to support your subject knowledge and provide ideas and inspiration for your primary school English teaching. Free membership gives you access to CLPE's free teaching resources for books, awards and special days, CLiPPA Poetry and Power of Pictures teaching sequences, booklists, teaching approaches and the reading and writing scales.

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There are some really useful tips here about using picturebooks.

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A great website for all sorts of reading experiences. Just do a search for 'Picturebooks' - there are some great posts there!

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An introduction to how important sharing books with babies as early as possible primarily aimed at parents. One of the first of its kind

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child care & upbringing: advice for parents

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children's & teenage literature studies: general

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family & relationships / parenting / general

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literary criticism / children's & young adult literature

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Buy Babies Need Books Third Edition 3rd Revised edition by Dorothy Butler (ISBN: 9780140156799) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Mem Fox reveals the emotional and intellectual impact that reading aloud to children has on their ability to learn to read. With passion and humor, Fox offers guidance on defining and choosing good books, and—for this new edition—includes two new chapters on boy readers and phonics, a foreword, and a list of "Twenty Books That Children Love."

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This updated edition of The Read-Aloud Handbook discusses the benefits, the rewards, and the importance of reading aloud to children of a new generation. Supported by anecdotes as well as research, it offers techniques and strategies for helping children discover the pleasures of reading and setting them on the road to becoming lifelong readers.

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Reading the Visual provides a range of frameworks for teaching a wide-range of visual and multimodal texts, including historical fiction, picture books, advertisements, websites, comics, graphic novels, news reports, and film.

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The Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac by Anita Silvey

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The Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac by Anita Silvey

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Each page features an event of the day, a children’s book that relates to that event, and a list of other events that took place on that day. Always informative and often surprising, celebrate a year of literature for children with The Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac.

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all about picturebooks a great resource for picturebook fans

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The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature by Daniel Hahn

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The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature by Daniel Hahn

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The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature provides an indispensable and fascinating reference guide to the world of children's literature. It has
over 3,500 authoritative and accessible entries on every aspect of children's literature, covering authors, illustrators, works, characters, genres, and much more.

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Great blog on children's literature by Mathew Tobin

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Mat Tobin: English and Children's Literature