 Hi everyone, my name is Steph. This is Kiddletjoy and welcome or welcome back to my channel. Today I am here to do a illustrated deep dive on Kelly Canby. Kelly Canby is an author and illustrator who was born overseas in London but grew up in Australia and has lived here ever since. And so I decided to do a bit of a deep dive into her picture books that she has written and illustrated collectively. She has illustrated other titles as well. She has illustrated books for other people as well as illustrated middle fiction books such as The Kingdoms and Empire Series by Jacqueline Moriarty. But I really just wanted to focus on her picture books that she's written and illustrated. Mostly because one of the books that she released last year is one of my all-time favourite picture books. And I thought it would be fun to sort of go back and read some of the other titles by her that I haven't yet. So this is part of the picture, this readathon, where one of the challenges is to do an illustrator deep dive and look at some of their back catalogue. I'm actually going to be doing two of these videos, one for Kelly Canby and one for Jeannie Baker. Kelly Canby was the one that I decided on and then I was talking to Jack, who is one of the creators of the readathon, and we were talking about Jeannie Baker's works. And so that inspired me to sort of go back and explore that illustrator as well. So if we start off with Kelly Canby's first picture book, it is All the Lost Things. This was first published in 2015. This is about Olive. She's a young girl who's out for a walk and she discovers, or hears, these sounds coming from a manhole cover and she goes to investigate. And what she finds underneath the city is a storage place for all the lost things, where everything that gets lost goes. And she is told that she can take whatever she likes because people have obviously forgotten about them. And so she scoops up various things. And one of the most gorgeous parts of this book is that she scoops up a jar of hope and she sprinkles it across the city. So it has a really lovely message. This is a really great first book that sort of really explores Kelly Canby's illustration style because she uses a lot of watercolor, a lot of bright colors, but she's also very good at using color to accentuate the story. So at the start of the book, the city is very dark and gray and sort of very dismal. She also uses a collage style. So there's lots of things that are cut out and pasted it down. So it's not only do you have illustrations, but you also have corrugated cardboard that's been cut out to create the collage. So it looks like it has a 3D element. And then you start to get the splashes of really bright watercolors coming into it. And then you can see how she's using the watercolor to really accentuate what's happening in the story, particularly as Olive moves through the city, which as I said, you know, is very dark and dismal. And as she empties hope out over the city, you suddenly get the city coming alive with color. Color is a very big theme that we will see with Kelly Canby's work. Then we have Rodney. So Rodney again, lots of bright color, same color style where the illustrations have been painted or drawn and then cut out to create a very 3D looking effect. Rodney is a turtle and he wants to know what it's like to live among the treetops. All of the birds and all the other animals tell him to come up there, but obviously he's a turtle who can't climb up that far. And it's about Rodney finding his own way to be part of the treetops. And it is really, really gorgeous. And the theme here is really around. Sometimes it's just a matter of perspective. So this one is lots and lots of color the whole way through the book. You can see that she uses watercolor as well as crayon and other mediums to sort of create a really messy texture, which is really fun to look at. I love this tree frogs page. And as Rodney comes out of the forest and starts to move sort of into the underbrush, he really notices that he actually becomes bigger. So even though he can't climb the trees, he can still live among the treetops. It's just in a different place. But as I said, I love how all of the cut out elements really help to create depth in this story, even though it's still pretty two-dimensional, like it still looks like there's a lot going on. The next Kelly Canby book is the whole story. And this one is really interesting because it's the start of Kelly Canby playing with puns and idioms and language, which we'll see come back in the last book that we talk about. So this is the story about Charlie. Charlie finds a hole in the ground. And he is excited to find the hole he grabs it, he puts it in his pocket and everything falls out of his pocket because he's put a hole in his pocket. And he puts it in his backpack and everything falls out of his backpack because he's put a hole in his backpack. And so he's trying to find a way to find this hole a new home. But no one wants a hole because the hole is going to cause problems for everyone, right? And eventually at the end of the story, the hole does find a purpose, which is great. But poor Charlie spends the majority of the book trying to find a purpose for it. So in this one, we have less of the cut out style, still more of the watercolor, but and also a lot of the use of grays and blacks in contrast with colors. It still has that same sort of messy crayon style as well, which I find really charming, honestly. And in here, as Charlie is going through the town, we begin to see word play. So bread pit bakery, Titanic hot food. And there's a lot of great word play as Charlie takes this hole to different places, like the pet store. And they're like, no, we don't need a hole, we don't need any of these animals getting out. The other really cool thing about this is the end papers. There's different end papers at the start and end of the book. So here is all of the houses in the town. And then here are some houses or homes for animals. And if you read the story, you'll find out why that's important. Then the very first book that I read by Kelly Canby was actually Little Light. And this came out and it was shortlisted one year. And this is an absolutely gorgeous story about a town that is walled in. So there's the town and it's completely surrounded by a wall. And the town slowly begin to realize that someone is taking bricks out of these walls and opening windows into what's outside the wall. And what's outside the wall are different communities of people who all experience life in different ways, who all have different music and food and culture. And the mayor of the town is really upset because he doesn't want strange and unusual things changing his town, right? But the rest of the town slowly begin to realize that actually they want to have those new foods and they want to have that new music and they want to have those new dances. And it's a gorgeous story about overcoming fear of change. And it is about how xenophobia can really keep you locked in to yourself and make you afraid of new things. And this is really about breaking down those barriers quite literally just with a little bit lost. We start off with quite a gray society and then pops of color as our mysterious rick thief is taking things down from the wall. We have these pops of fluoro color to represent the different windows that open up within the walls. Here's a window into one community and another and another. And I just love the way that the color has been used to show that something is different, but it's a really bright color. So it's really inviting and warm. At the end, you just have this beautiful mishmash of all of these colors. It's gorgeous. And then finally, one of my favorite books, and I've talked about it heaps on this channel, is Timeless by Kelly Canby. Now the thing that struck me about this when I first saw it was the amazing colors on the front cover. It is absolutely stunning. I also adore these endpapers, which if you remember the whole story where Kelly Canby was playing with words, she does it here again, Dr. Justin Time, Richman Banker, Dourish Shut Locksmith, Dwayne Pipe, Plumbing, Carrier Exceening Teacher. So there's a lot of really fun things to look at and to play with language in the book. But this is also the story of a young boy called Emmett, and he is trying to find more time. So there's simply no time at all. Someone was always running out of time or losing track of it. We're using lots of idioms and plays on words and word phrases using time through the whole story. Lots of stunning bright colors the whole way through the book. It's just so clever. And it is so engaging and vibrant and inviting that it is a really fun experience to read. Again, the endpapers have more plays on words for all of the different shops, which I find utterly charming and delightful. This is absolutely one of my favorites from last year, and I'm so glad I got shortlisted for the Children's Book Council Awards for this year because it is really, really clever. So that is my deep dive into Kelly Canby. I will leave links to all of these books down below. So if you want to find out more information, you can. I'm not sure how many of them are available overseas. I think most of them are. So do a little bit of digging. I'll leave Kelly Canby's website linked down below as well. That's always a good source if things are being published overseas under different titles, which sometimes happens with Australian books. But I thoroughly enjoyed going in and exploring the books by Kelly Canby that I hadn't yet. And I just, I find her very creative and very dynamic in the books that she creates. I'd love to know if you've read Kelly Canby's books before or if you're planning on picking any of them up. Otherwise feel free to leave a clock emoji down below to let me know that you're here. I hope that wherever you're on the world you're staying safe and healthy and I will see you in my next video. Thanks so much for watching. Bye everyone.