UNIT 10: Picture book further research

A style that I really like is Maurice Sendak's 'Where the wild things are' picture book. I love the detail that goes in to his work and how he fills the entire page with illustration. I love the patters, colours and crosshatching techniques he uses and feel that my style of drawing is similar in a sense that I also love to create very detailed fine liner drawings.

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Another illustrator that I've been inspired by for years is Brett Helquist, who illustrated the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Helquist uses very sharp, straight lines and only subtle traces of colour which I prefer. Again, he makes very detailed work with interesting crosshatching techniques.

UNIT 10: Picture book primer & research

For this project, I'll be making a children's picture book.
I've started my research by looking at picture books that I find interesting to get inspiration for my own work.
I looked at 'The stinky cheese man and other fairly stupid tales'. This book includes classic fairy tales but with stupid stories. I noticed the use of text and the play on words. I really like that the book keeps the reader interested by using these techniques as oppose to just writing the stories in one font and size.

Some more classics I remembered were books like The Gruffalo, We're going on a bear hunt and The Cat in the Hat which were some of my favourites growing up. 

I looked for patterns in these books to try to figure out ways to create my own. I noticed that most of these books include a character (usually an animal or inspired by an animal). The use of different sized text is also important. Big writing in capital letters usually implies shouting or speaking loudly. Also bright colour's are very eye catching to keep young children interested in these books.

Although, these are fairly straight forward to understand and the language is simple, they usually include an important moral which is educational to the child.