Illustrator Paper

Tomie dePaola is a very popular children’s book author that writes and illustrates his own books. Although dePaola has dozens of books written and illustrated by him, many of his books’ illustrations are similar. In a sample of three of his books, Pancakes for Breakfast, Tom, and Strega Nona’s Magic Lessons, his characters look very much alike and his styles are similar. However, there are some elements from each book that differs from each other.

In all three books, dePaola uses all kinds of lines, jagged, straight, thick, thin, and soft to do a couple of different things. First of all, characters in all 3 of his books are very simple. Their faces and their emotions are expressed through simple lines and shapes. Although they are not complex, you are able to see what the characters are thinking and feeling simply by looking at how dePaola composes his lines. Second, in Pancakes for Breakfast, he used bumpy lines to show slopes and hills and jagged lines to draw shapes of tree branches. In Strega Nona’s Magic Lessons, dePaola used a lot of curvy lines on his characters. He did a good job of showing the characters’ more full body shapes th

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Also, this particular book, like Pancakes for Breakfast wasn’t filled with a lot of details. Third, dePaola also uses his lines to create texture in Pancakes for Breakfast, but not so much in Strega Nona’s Magic Lessons and Tom.

I really liked the illustrations in Tom also because of its simplicity. As I mentioned before, the facial expressions of the characters really helped tell how they were feeling and what they were thinking. For example, one of the characters in the book, Bambolona had a purple skirt on and the color of the skirt was a mixture of blue and purple. He used different shades of one color for a lot of his illustrations. For example, in Strega Nona, he used a lot of mixed colors.

In all three of the books examined, dePaola uses a lot of colors to engage the young reader. He did a good job using color in this particular book to show the happiness in the characters Tom and Tommie who were grandfather and grandson who always enjoyed spending time together, which is what the book is about. For example, the walls and the backgrounds in the illustrations were bare and the focus of the illustrations were on what the characters were doing. The composition of the illustrations provided me with all the information I needed to read the story. Also, in this particular book, there wasn’t as much detail as in Tom and Strega Nona. rough use of curvy lines rather than straighter lines. For example, in Pancakes for Breakfast, he does a very good job of using criss cross lines to show how barn walls are textured, and he did a really good job of using lines to show the rough texture of hay in the barn. I really enjoyed Pancakes for Breakfast for the reason that it was very simple and the illustrations did such a good job telling me the story since it was a wordless book.

Approximate Word count = 794
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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