As part of Children’s Mental Health Week 2025, Anna Llenas — author and illustrator of ‘The Colour Monster’ — reflects on the role art can play in helping children understand and express their emotions. Her words come as The Colour Monster Residency arrives at FRAMELESS, transforming the much-loved children’s picture book into an immersive, sensory experience where families can explore feelings together.
There are things we don’t know how to say.
There are emotions that have no words, or that don’t yet have them. They move inside
us, they are felt in the body, but they don’t always know how to come out. Especially
in childhood, when what we feel is intense and language is still small.
Art is one way of getting closer to them.
Of making the invisible visible.
Of giving shape to what moves inside us without a name.
In The Colour Monster, this gesture takes form through colour, image and space. Not
to explain emotions, but to offer them a place to exist.
Sometimes words are needed.
Other times, words are not enough.
Art, and writing too, allow this movement from one language to another: placing
images where words are not yet present, or words where images no longer reach. It is
in this in-between space, sensitive and open, where understanding often begins.
When I created The Colour Monster, I wasn’t thinking about theories or explanations. It
was an intuitive, almost primal gesture: giving a simple, visual form to a complex
emotional experience. Over these ten years, I’ve been able to observe how very
different children—from different cultures, languages and contexts—connect with this
proposal in an immediate way. Without filters. Without prior instructions.
Colour is one of the first languages we learn. It is direct, bodily, intuitive. Yellow can
feel like the sun. Blue, like rain. Red, like fire. Through colour, what is abstract
becomes concrete and shareable. A child can point to an image and say, “This is how I
feel.” And sometimes, that is enough.
This direct connection is what has allowed the story to remain alive over the past ten
years. In the UK, this anniversary coincides with the ten-year publication of the book
with Templar Books, who made it possible for the story to reach so many families and
schools. Looking back and acknowledging this shared journey is also a way of
honouring the time lived.
Seeing this universe transformed into an immersive experience at FRAMELESS, in
London, has been especially moving. The work stops being just a reading and becomes
a space that can be inhabited with the body. A place where children and adults can
enter, pause, look and feel. Without hurry. Without demands. Without having to
understand everything.
That this moment coincides with Children’s Mental Health Week makes a lot of sense
to me. Not because the book speaks about mental health in clinical terms, but because
it focuses on something essential: giving space and permission to what we feel.
Emotionally supporting children doesn’t always mean explaining what is happening to
them, but listening to them and not denying what they feel. Recognising an emotion
doesn’t mean giving free rein to everything that comes from it, but helping to find
more caring ways of expressing it.
One of the most valuable aspects of this work is how it becomes a shared experience.
When an adult and a child read The Colour Monster together, or enter its universe
together, they don’t just share a story. They share a meeting: an intimate emotional
moment, an opportunity to welcome both of their emotions and to generate empathy.
Simple questions like “What colour are you feeling today?” can open deep
conversations. Not to find correct answers, but to create a climate where emotions are
welcome. Where feeling is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be
acknowledged.
After these ten years, the wish remains the same: that children and adults feel there is
a place for everything they feel. That there is no need to put everything in order right
away. That they are not alone. And that when emotions are seen and welcomed,
something inside us settles. And that, too, is health.
Thank you to everyone who has accompanied this little monster over the years, and to
the FRAMELESS team for making it possible to experience its world now as an immersive
space. Continuing to give value to sensitivity, to art and to shared emotions is, today
more than ever, a necessary gesture.
Anna Llenas