In Hello! Hello! the color and the white space was a very important part of the storytelling. So it starts out, so the girl is always in color because she’s sort of enlightened so to speak from the beginning. But the background of her, the interior of her home is always in black and white because the parents and the little brother are very, they’re very absorbed into the, their phones and tech, tech gadgets.
And there’s a lot of white space early on too, and then as she decides to walk outside she starts to see nature and she starts to see those backgrounds in color but it still hasn’t, the white space hasn’t all gone away. So as she’s slowly walking out doors the pages begin to fill up so the spreads begin to become more illustrated and more colorful.
And so by the time she’s really using her imagination which is when she gets, finds this horse, which I always ask kids do you think the horse is real or imaginary and most of the time they say imaginary because most people don’t just walk outside and find a horse in their yard so they kind of pick up on that. So by the time the spreads have evolved into all kinds of animals, dinosaurs and whales and fish flying through the air, the kids really know what’s happening.
Like she’s really, she’s really you know embracing the outdoors and she’s really embracing her imagination and so everything is in color, it’s really like you know very, you know more detailed illustrations and so yeah, the, it’s sort of like a Wizard of Oz moment in a way where as soon as you become, you know as soon as you’re reading the world of imagination, the outside world, that’s when things start to really bloom and become colorful.