Childrens book research

Highly reccomend giving this a read, it's very helpful:

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/MERGA33_Marston.pdf

It's about creating picture books that help develop a young readers brain, through mathematics and using concepts and basic principles that it describes, basically instead of making terrible picture books that'll just turn your kids brain to goop. Very good read.


I figured "Where the Wild Things Are" is the best, so I decided to research and analyse it, in order to get a better idea of underlying themes, concepts, and messages displayed throughout it.

The title.
Even this title is probably too scary for children of a young age, out of context, but using the images that it has on the front cover it makes the childrens book seems very playful. Images are key.

The book helps develop a kids imagination. It is basically a dream journey.

Max is sent to his room where his imagination grows and he sails out into a dream where he is able to tame monsters. these monster could represent his emotions (overall taming his emotions).

The borders of the pages grow as his imagination does until we see a full double page spread of him and these monters in this dream land. And after he comes back home we see the border at a comfortable size compared to the dream border.

Great childrens book with many hidden meanings and also some references back to mythology (such as warewolves, max's get-up, and the monsters resembling "all devouring behemoth").

And although it is a frightening story, for children it works. The style of linework is very interesting and maybe I could use that style for my own images.