10+ Kids' Books Illustrated by Marc Brown

Marc Brown is best known as the author and illustrator of the Arthur books, but he has illustrated many more titles written by others as well. Below is a partial list of these works.

Picture Books by Judy Sierra

 

Marc Brown has illustrated several titles by author Judy Sierra. 

Wild About Books is a rhyming story in which a librarian introduces a love of reading to the animals living at her local zoo. In its companion story, Wild About You, an unhatched egg arrives at the zoo, and when the new baby arrives, it is readily adopted by the tree kangaroo and her friends.

Another zoo-themed story, ZooZical, tells what happens when a group of bored animals come together to put on a musical.

In Born to Read, a book loving boy named Sam  reads non-stop, leading him to experience many happy successes in life.

Other Picture Books

In 2007, Marc Brown teamed up with Rosemary Wells to create The Gulps. Brown's illustrations bring to life a family of rabbits with unhealthy eating habits. While on a family road trip, the  rabbits discover that their RV can't carry all the junk food they packed, and while stranded, a farmer helps them learn how to replace their favorite fast foods with healthier alternatives.

Marc Brown has also teamed up with author Lindsey Craig to produce two musically-oriented picture books: Dancing Feet and Farmyard Beat. In Dancing Feet, the text provides an onomatopoetic expression of the sound made by a particular animal's dancing feet, and the reader is invited to guess who it might be. In Farmyard Beat, the animals have a wild middle-of-the-night party in the barn, which wakes up Farmer Sue. Both of these books use a unique collage style which is different from Brown's typical illustrations.

Using the same style, Brown provides the pictures for Ten Tiny Toes by Todd Tarpley, which celebrates a variety of foot-related baby milestones.

Series

Marc Brown's wife, Laurie Krasny Brown has written a series of Dino Life Guides for Families, which provide child-friendly information about important topics including divorce, death, safety, making friends, and going green. Marc Brown's dinosaurs help make the information more palatable to young readers and they share the same sweet faces as the well-known Arthur characters.

When I was in first grade, I loved to read the Little Witch series by Deborah Hautzig. It wasn't until years later that I made the connection between these books and Marc Brown's style, but it should have been obvious based on the color palette and characters' faces.  (Note: some of the later books are illustrated by a different artist in the style of Marc Brown.)

Collections

 

Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young is my favorite poetry collection to share with babies. Brown's sweet style contributes to the book's cheerful and enticing qualities and his plentiful pictures provide context to help young readers understand the poems more fully.

In the 1980s, Marc Brown collected and illustrated several popular books of children's  rhymes: Finger Rhymes, Hand Rhymes, Party Rhymes, and Play Rhymes. Many of the rhymes from these books were included in his 2013 collection, Marc Brown's Playtime Rhymes: A Treasury for Families to Learn and Play Together.

Brown is also the illustrator of  The Family Read-Aloud Christmas Treasury edited by Alice Low.

For more illustrator booklists, click here.