Dog Blue

Dunbar’s work is characterized by her distinctive line drawings and use of colour. Indeed, colour is a theme of her first two picture books,
Product Description
What Bertie wants more than anything in the world is a dog, a blue dog, and then….

About the author, from Booktrust interview
Dog Blue probably uses less colour than any other picture book she has illustrated.

‘With Dog Blue I wanted him to have his favourite colour being blue but also feeling blue, and that didn’t end up in the book because I thought it was maybe too sophisticated a concept, but hopefully it shows the feeling without saying he feels blue. I wanted to show that you can use colour to show different moods.’

‘Doing books like Dog Blue, where there is no collage, there is no fancy background, it’s been really good learning how to draw a character from page to page, keeping that continuity when there’s nothing around to support it, and that drawing therefore has to be very good to be a whole page spread on its own. That’s been a really good training for me in learning to draw children and how to capture their emotional qualities.

‘When you’re just doing a few dots and lines, not only does their emotion change very very quickly, but they can look like a completely different boy every time. So changing those dots and lines to express the emotion but also keeping hold of that same child, it’s quite a process.

‘It takes a while to get to know the child so I don’t have to think about how to draw him at all, I can concentrate on how he’s feeling. It’s almost getting into character as an actor or something