The book I chose to do for project one is called “If you Give a Moose a Muffin” by Laura Joffe Numeroff which is illustrated by Felicia Bond. The story is about a young boy and a moose. It starts off by a boy giving a moose a muffin and then the moose wanting jam with his muffin. After he is finished with the muffin he wants another and another until they are eventually all gone. The moose wants more so the boy gets ready to go to the store to get more ingredients to make more muffins, this leads to the moose wanting different things throughout the book until it eventually ends up to him wanting a muffin again.
From these sources they say that the moral of the story is to “Keep plenty of muffin mix and blackberry jam in your cupboard. You never know who may drop by” and that children will be able to learn the concept of cause and effect. I think I would have to agree with the cause and effect. It shows that by the boy giving the moose everything he wanted he kept pushing for more and the boy continued to fulfill the moose’s requests. I personally have two ways to look at this. First I think that the moose was being a little greedy as he kept asking for more and more things but it is a children’s book so I don’t think they are trying to teach kids to be greedy like the moose so the other way I viewed this is that it is nice to share and help people out when they need something.
After looking at the information I found I think I’m going to take the approach and try and show that sharing and being nice can really go a long way. I want to take all the aspects and things named in the book and try and portray this in a more realistic way so I’m not sure if I’m going to use a moose or maybe take two people and show it in a more realistic manner.
For the one idea I have I took the things that the boy gave the moose and found images of them online a jar of jam, white bed sheets, a moose, and a muffin. I like these images because I think they will work well together because they go with the warm feeling that the book portrayed but the only thing is I’m going to have to do a lot of work with them to get the single object out that I want to use. For my other idea i was thinking about just taking two people and showing one of them lending a hand like the boy did with the moose by giving him the things that he had asked for. I think I could maybe be more creative with this idea and show the sharing in a different way then just with the exact things from the book.
Research
http://www.librarything.com/work/29258
http://www.carolhurst.com/titles/ifyougiveamoose.html
Thumbnails
Sketches
These are the two concepts I finally came up with the one is of a hand and a muffin reaching out to a moose. For this idea I just wanted to take the three main characters/objects out of the book and put some text saying sharing is caring because I feel this is what it trying to portray among some other things. The second idea I have is to have the boy and the moose at a table and to put in more of the things the moose asks for throughout the story and put text saying to be grateful for what you have because I think this is also the lesson that is trying to be taught in this children’s story. I thought about it more and after looking through the illustrations of the book I think I’m going to try and give it a feel of a painting because that is how the illustrations are drawn. I want to stick with the fall/warmer colors that are used in the book reds, greens, browns, yellows.
I ended up using a couple clip art photos I found on the Internet, I thought about using real images but I couldn’t find a photo of a moose that fit what I wanted to do. I ended up taking the images into Photoshop and used the brush tool to paint the images to the colors I wanted. There wasn’t a whole lot that needed to be done to the images besides a little resizing and addition of color. I then took color samples from the books images and painted a brownish green background. I also found an image of a blanket and used the pen tool to trace it out to give the look of the other clip art images. I added the text be grateful for what you have because after reading over the book again I think that the moose in the book was always wanting more and more from the little boy instead of just being happy with the muffin that he had given him in the first place. I also added some drop shadow to the moose and child as well as the text.