Letter Monsters illustrations by Joey Ellis

Joey Ellis's Letter Monsters are a hoot. He made the entire alphabet to help his son learn his letterin'.

[#1 posted by Anonymous , February 13, 2009 5:46 PM]

Check out the collective noun cards http://lrcd.com/index.php?catID=17 The artist Sarah has fun with rack of Raven, Army of Ants, and so on. Mike

[#2 posted by TroofSeeker , February 13, 2009 6:40 PM]

That was a wonderful thing he did for his son- I'm sure it did the boy a lot more good than just learning the alphabet. Last night my son said he wants to practice drawing. I got us each paper and pencil and said let's each draw something that starts with the letter A. Then B. We did the alphabet twice, once inanimate objects, then living things. It was great fun, and invaluable time spent bonding. Parents should enter their child's world and play with them. Daily. OMHO

[#3 posted by Johnny Cat , February 13, 2009 8:21 PM]

Cool beans, Troofseeker. A+

[#4 posted by IamInnocent , February 13, 2009 11:43 PM]

Capital I is my favorite.

I love to watch children drawing while they tell m stories about what they draw. My own drawing is irremediably adult and I don't want to submit the kids to such a bad influence at their tender age.

That's a lot of "I"s in one comment...

[#5 posted by TheCrawNotTheCraw , February 14, 2009 11:06 AM]

This is very appealing.

And his child will have these letters to appreciate/remember his father..."later on."

[#6 posted by auilix , February 14, 2009 6:37 PM]

This is cute!! Reminds me of a thing my friend who does a webcomic did with a monsters/mythological alphabet which she sells on Etsy here:
http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=8091432

I LOVE how she did Z for Zombie and K for Kraken!!

[#7 posted by Anonymous , February 14, 2009 6:40 PM]

I'm an artist and my studio (bar the dangerous stuff obviously) is open to both my kiddos. They actually have their own shelves and supplies. Everything from paint to felt to good ol' manila paper and glitter. I applaud all parents who actually take the time to hang out with their kids doing activities!!

[#8 posted by Anonymous , February 16, 2009 2:18 AM]

I'm impressed with the artistic effort, but I wonder whether they are actually helpful for someone learning to read.

Over the last few years I've made the effort to learn a couple of non-Latin scripts, and trying to train the visual system for pattern recognition with different fonts, styles, weights etc is non-trivial. (The scripts I was working with happened to have a lot of diacritics too, which is a minor issue in English, unless you need to refer to Anais Nin or Emily Bronte.)

I think that these amusing and playful *complications* of the basic letterforms will make it harder for a child to puzzle out the *essentials* of the letterforms.

[#9 posted by Trace , February 16, 2009 7:07 AM]

Reminds me of the old Topps Monster Initial stickers of the early 70's"

http://www.bubblegumcards.org/Monster_Initials.html