Monsters Love Colors

by Mike Austin, Mike Austin (Illustrator)

Overview

An explosively bright and colorful picture book with lots of kid appeal

Did you know that monsters love to scribble, scribble, mix, dance, and wiggle?!

Why? Because monsters love to make new colors!

Celebrate along with the hilarious monsters in this wild and energetic picture book. Mixing and discovering color has never been so much fun! Sure to spark the imaginative artist in everyone.

Monsters Love Colors is a good companion to such favorites as Herve Tullet’s Mix It Up! and Claire Freedman and Ben Cort’s Monsters Love Underpants.

Plus check out Monsters Love School by Mike Austin!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062125941
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	02/05/2013
Pages:	40
Sales rank:	120,887
Product dimensions:	9.20(w) x 9.08(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Mike Austin is an award-winning illustrator and graphic designer. He is the author-illustrator of several picture books, including Monsters Love Colors, Monsters Love School, JunkYard, Fire Engine No. 9 and Hooray for Helpers! He lives on Whidbey Island, Washington, with his wife—author-illustrator Jing Jing Tsong—and their lovable mutt, Prudence. You can visit him online at www.jingandmike.com. 

Mike Austin is an award-winning illustrator and graphic designer. He is the author-illustrator of several picture books, including Monsters Love Colors, Monsters Love School, JunkYard, Fire Engine No. 9 and Hooray for Helpers! He lives on Whidbey Island, Washington, with his wife—author-illustrator Jing Jing Tsong—and their lovable mutt, Prudence. You can visit him online at www.jingandmike.com. 

Editorial Reviews

Austin’s (Countdown with Milo and Mouse) monsters—fuzzy, shapeless blobs with googly eyes and big smiles—look a lot like Muppets, and they’re similarly loud and boisterous. They’re equipped with crayons and paint, and they eagerly describe what they’re doing (“Scribble! Scribble! Drip! Splash! Dribble!”). After messy opening scenes involving crayon-scrawling and paint-splashing, three primary-colored monsters announce their favorite colors (their own, of course). “Red is the color of roar! and snore! and more! more! more!” yells the red monster; the blue one gets so carried away, he starts to eat his favorite crayon. Next, the three give some smaller, gray monsters colors of their own. “What new favorite color can we make for you?” they ask. “Orange!” shouts one gray monster. The red and yellow monsters scribble frantically all over the gray monster (“Scribble, scribble, mix, dance, and wiggle! Mixing red and yellow makes orange!”), who emerges orange. Despite the friendly chaos, the pages retain a crisp, commercial look, with a glossy finish and mixed-media images that pop against backdrops of white. Whether children retain the ideas of color mixing, they’ll be thoroughly entertained. Ages 4–8. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

PreS-K—Bloblike monsters in primary hues energetically scribble, mix, dance, wiggle, and otherwise enjoy playing with color. Each creature makes a statement about what its color stands for, without any particular logic: why red is the color of snore, yellow the color of growl, and blue the color of nibble are not explained. The primary colors offer to make new ones for some little gray monsters and produce orange, green, and purple in turn. On the final page, they pull together a rainbow, but while the colors are in the proper order in the word rainbow, the illustration shows red followed by yellow, not orange. Better books that describe the color-mixing process include Ellen Stoll Walsh's Mouse Paint (Harcourt, 1989) and Arnold Lobel's The Great Blueness and Other Predicaments (Harper & Row, 1968).—Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJ

School Library Journal

Dynamic monsters cavort and shriek and play with color. These monsters have googly eyes, big cartoon grins and unthreateningly rounded bodies. At the beginning, some are a single primary color, while others are smaller and gray. One red monster, one yellow monster and one blue monster extol the virtues of their own colors with jubilant chantability if not strict logic: "Red is the color of ROAR! and SNORE! and more! more! MORE!"; "Yellow is the color of PROWL! and HOWL! and GROWL! GROWL! GROWL!"; "Blue is the color of Scribble and Dribble and Nibble Nibble Nibble." Other verses are more hit-or-miss--for example, one page tries to rhyme "splash" with "squash," which may cause a stumble for adults reading aloud. However, all the monsters gyrate and boogie with exuberance, and their mixing of colors has exciting results. The small gray monsters become secondary colors, and one lucky little fellow who requests "SUPER tropical MEGA monster RAINBOW swirl with raspberry on TOP!" gets multicolored stripes and a rainbow parade to lead. Austin's squiggly, untamed swirls of crayon, pencil and ink and the high energy in his casual style (complete with silliness: "Hey! Don't eat your crayons, silly monster!") may coax even the bounciest little monsters to sit down for storytime--and run for the crayons and poster paper afterwards. Groovy. (Picture book. 2-5)

Kirkus Reviews