Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

By: Verna Aardema

Pictures by: Leo and Diane Dillon

This story has vivid, bright colorful pictures containing almost human-like animals. In the book, it states, "The art for this book was prepared in full color using watercolors applied with an airbrush in both fine spray and spatter technique, pastels rubbed on by hand, and india ink. The cut-out effect was achieved by actually cutting the shapes out of vellum and frisket masks at several different stages." Basically, in case you have yet to read this story, a mosquito tells Iguana a story and this sets off a chain reaction with all the animals in the jungle.

The first thing I noticed was the color of the illustrations. They are bright and colorful and close to real-life colors of animals. The animals are also very big and almost in-your-face. Sometimes, an iguana will be almost a 2 page bleed. The background is either white during the day and black for nighttime. Using only these two colors for the backgrounds really makes the animals stand out to the reader. Another interesting point about the animals is their facial expressions. They have their mouths open, looking surprised at times and also have their eyes closed when the text calls for it. They are almost human-like.

The bright, colorful illustrations and the in-your-face size of the animals seem very imaginative as something like this happening in everyday life would be.