Visual Literacy and the Picture Book, pt 1

What is the role of pictures in books for young children? Is it simply to illustrate the text? Having spent so many years as readers, we adults tend to privilege text at the expense of illustration. Library users are always asking me for a good story, a funny story, for a tale about trucks, ballerinas, or animals, for a book that teaches manners or what have you, for a book that will help a child learn to read, or one that fosters a desired "learning outcome". I only rarely have users come to me looking for a certain style of art or expressing a desire to teach visual literacy.

I remember reading simple vocabulary books to my daughter in that year where language hit her like a tidal wave. Words. Words. Words. Words were what she needed and words were what I gave her. Invariably, I found my word-centred self pointing to the black squiggle of text as I was reading and not to the picture she was looking at. Young children see the world differently, though. They acquire visual literacy long before they can decipher those black marks on the page. Good children's writers and illustrators know this. Good children's writers and illustrators design their books to cater to a child's need for aural, verbal, visual and, eventually, written literacy.

The most common form of book for young children is the picture book: 32 pages that most often contain text and pictures, although the former can be absent. In a good picture book, the text and art complement each other. I use the word "complement" on purpose, as it comes from the root "complete." In a good picture book neither the text nor art is complete without the other. Oftentimes the story can stand alone in a less rich form, but many innovative picture books depend on their illustrations to tell part or all of the story.

Take for example, Pat Hutchin's Rosie's Walk published in 1967. It is usually acknowledged as the first picture book in which the words deliberately leave out part of the story. The words tell in brief, literal detail what happens when Rosie, the hen, goes for a walk around the barnyard. Only the illustrations show what happens to the ill-fated fox who chooses to follow her. Page after page, the fox gets his comeuppance and Rosie? Well, she gets "back in time for dinner". End of story.


This style of integrated storytelling is quite prevalent in contemporary picture books. One of my favourite renderings of it is the Caldecott medal-winning Officer Buckle and Gloria by Peggy Rathmann.



I wish I could find pictures online to show you Gloria the police dog's outlandish enactments of Officer Buckle's safety tips. Better yet, I wish I could show you the climax illustration when Officer Buckle realizes he's been had by his best friend. You'll have to go check it out to see for yourself if you haven't read it already.

How does the 10 dollar expression "visual literacy" differ from the 10 cent version "looking at pictures"? A lot can be said for how pictures themselves invite the reader in and promote an interpretive framework. A few basic design principles provide the foundation for all visual communication. How these principles are employed by the artist acting in tandem with the writer determine the degree of engagement a reader can have with a picture book. To explain, I am relying on the The On-line Visual Literacy Project at Ponoma College. The article, which outlines the 11 fundamental components of design, is well-researched and well-cited. I highly recommend it, should you wish to pursue these issues further. I plan to tackle the basic design components here by dividing them into four groupings and looking at those groupings through the lens of picture book illustration. They are:

The building blocks (dot, line, shape, and texture)
Movement (motion and direction)
Colour (hue, value, and saturation), and
Perspective (scale and dimension)

The rest of today's post will look at the building blocks. My next post will cover movement and perspective. A final post will look at the use of colour in picture books.

The Building Blocks
The dot and the line are fundamental to all artistic creation. The dot is a stable, grounding force: a moon in the sky or an object in the distance that your eye is drawn to. Lines create while dots merely are. The exception to this rule is in contemporary visual technology whereby all images are expressed through a series of dots. The genius of Roy Lichtenstein was to turn our way of looking at a screen or a comic book back on us and to make us aware of the visual make-up of new technology as a series of dots.


from Roy Lichtenstein's ABC by Bob Adelman, 1999, a book for adults as much as it is for kids.

The line creates all movement, direction, and perspective. The line, when used cleverly, is an object lesson in how art works.

from Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson, 1955.

Straight lines, particularly diagonals suggest activity. Curved lines sooth and rock with a gentle motion.

From lines, shape emerges. The comforting, rolling circle is a big ol' dot that depends upon line for its movement.

Richard McGuire's Orange Book, 1993


Kevin Henkes' Caldecott-winning Kitten's First Full Moon, 2004. Notice the grounding circles in the moon, in the fireflies and in the kitten herself. Then notice how the angled line of the tail directs your eye to the moon so that we look at they very thing that has caught the kitten's attention.

The claustrophobic square and rectangle...


from Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson, 1955.

...with their promise of escape.



from Jeannie Baker's Window, 1991.

Is it any wonder that Sendak's masterpiece, Where the Wild Things Are, begins in Max's house bounded by a white, square frame on the page. With each page, the frame gets smaller and smaller until Max sails off to the land of the wild things. At this point, the frame disappears altogether and the image becomes a full-page bleed. In fact, the wild things themselves would burst the bounds of the book if they could.


The manic triangle is all lines and angles scarcely bound. It keeps your eyes always moving.

from Stephen T. Johnson's Alphabet City, 1995

from Gerald McDermott's Arrow to the Sun, 1974.

Triangles, because they contain at least two diagonal lines, represent energy and movement, particularly when they are sitting on their angles instead of their base.

An aside:
If a child has moved past the random scribble in fine motor skill development, check out the books of Ed Emberly. Alternatively, go to his website where you will find countless drawing exercises that let kids turn the dot, the line, and the fundamental shapes into just about any object under the sun. Voila:


Child readers discover texture early on: pat the bunny, pop-up, and crinkle-paper books abound in our tactile, catered-to-baby culture. An image does not need faux fur or sandpaper to convey texture, though, and different illustration techniques can often make a one-dimensional image seem 3D.


Canadian Barbara Reid models her illustrations out of clay before they are transferred to paper for printing. This illustration is from Effie, 1999. The computer screen does not do justice to the level of detail in her art. Take, for example, this image from her version of Noah's ark entitled Two By Two, 1992.


If you haven't read a book with Barbara Reid illustrations, hurry out and do so immediately. As an aside, there is a wonderful detail in this illustration: Noah's wife (dressed in green on the middle deck) has just realized that she's stepped in dung and is looking at the bottom of her shoe in disgust.

Wallace Edwards supplements detail with competing colours and patterns to create a textured look.

from Wallace Edwards' Alphabeasts, 2002.

Eric Carle creates texture by using multi-coloured tissue paper in his art. It's always fun to read a bunch of Carle books and then have your kids create tissue paper art. You can give them colouring page image outlines, if you want, and then let them do the rest.

from The Very Quiet Cricket, 1990.

Barry Moser, Chris VanAllsburg, and Christopher Bing have all used woodcuts or pen-and-ink in the style of woodcuts to create texture.




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Out of 11 design fundamentals, I have now covered 4. The remaining 7 will follow over the next two posts. In the meantime, ask yourself as you read stories to children, "does this picture add something of value to the book? Does it create mood, set tone, establish character? Is the image energetic or peaceful? Does it extend the mind in interesting ways beyond what is conveyed by the words on the page? How does it accomplish its task?"

The continuation of this series can be found here:
Part 2. Movement (motion and direction) and Perspective (scale and dimension)
Part 3 Colour (hue, value, and saturation)

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The images in this post have been used as part of a work of criticism and under the clause of "fair dealing" in the Canadian Canadian Copyright Act. I have not used more than 10% of any given work.

Tips for finding good books and making the most of your local library

1. Ask your children's librarian for recommendations: Whether you're a teacher, education student or parent, a good children's librarian is yours and your student's/child's best friend. She/he will be able to recommend books that are pitched to your child's interests and abilities. She/he will know other books that are like titles your child already loves. She/he will know if a new dinosaur book has just come in or if the latest Stella and Sam book is about to be published. If Christmas is coming, ask him/her about what books to buy vs borrow for your child or other children. Ask her what tools and resources are available at the library to help you self-select materials. Shop around for a librarian or library staff person that you mesh with. Just because you had a bad experience with one person at the help desk doesn't mean that another person in the organization won't be more up your alley.

2. Use your library catalogue: Find out how to use your library catalogue well and then use it often. In my library, I can limit search results to just children's books (and sometimes depending on the search I can limit to just the picture books in the collection). Setting such limits makes it easy to perform targeted searches on subjects a child is currently interested in: elephants, dinosaurs, farms and the like. Library catalogues may also allow you to limit your searches by date of publication or language as well. For example, I often get language students coming to me looking for French children's books to help them as they learn the language.

3. Read reviews: Does your local paper write reviews of children's books? If so, read them and then ask for recommended titles at your library. Does your library subscribe to a reviewing service like the Children's Literature Comprehensive Database (CLCD)? If so, you can quickly and easily look up reviews of books that you might be considering to find out if a) they are recommended and b) if they would be appropriate for the particular child/class you have in mind. If your library does subscribe to the CLCD, you can generate subject specific book lists that are pitched to a particular age range or reading level.

4. Devour award winners: Read your way through the extensive lists of award winners and honour books that are now posted all over the internet. If you find a book you especially like, then find every other book that author wrote. Keep in mind that award books can span age ranges so make sure you've got an age-appropriate book in your hands before you start reading aloud at bed time. Here are some lists of award winners to get you started but there are plenty more out there:

US-based awards
The Caldecott Medal: Awarded to the best picture book by an American citizen or resident published in the US in any given year. The current winner and honour books are listed here. A complete listing of past winners is here.

The Newbery Medal: The oldest, ongoing prize for children's literature in the world, the Newbery medal is awarded to the most distinguished work for children published in the US in any given year. The current winner and honour books are here. Past winners are listed here.

The Michael L. Printz Award: An annual award that recognizes literary excellence in young adult literature. The current winner and honour book are listed here. The full listing of past winners and honour books is here.

The Coretta Scott King Book Award: This annual award is given to African-American writers and illustrators of books for children. The current winner is listed here (and is sitting by my bedside) along with the 2008 honour books. A full listing of winners and honour books can be found here.

The Boston-Globe Horn Book Prize is presented annually in three categories for prestigious picture book, fiction and poetry, and nonfiction published in the United States. Here's the current winners and the full listing of award winners.

The New York Times Best Illustrated Books for Children is an annual listing. Here is a slideshow for the 2007 edition of the awards.

Canadian Awards
The Governor General's Literary Awards: Awarded annually, one for children's text and one for children's illustration with categories in both English and French. Here's the 2008 shortlist. Here is the list of past winners.

The Amelia Frances Howard-Gibbon Award: Awarded to the outstanding illustrator of a children's book published in Canada. The complete list of winners is here.

The Canadian Children's Book Centre maintains a listing of Canadian book awards. Rather than reprinting it all here, you can find the full list on their website.


British Awards
The Kate Greenaway Medal: Awarded annually for children's illustration. It's the UK's equivalent to the Caldecott Medal. Current short list is here. Past winners are here.

The Carnegie Medal: Awarded annually to the writer of an outstanding book for children. It's the British equivalent of the Newbery Medal. Current short list is here. Past winners are here.

Smarties Prize (renamed Nestle Book Prize): A recently discontinued UK prize for various age categories of children's literature. The Smarites Prize was sometimes considered controversial because of its affiliation with Nestle and their practice of promoting infant formula use in developing countries. 2007 winners are on the main page. Past winners are listed here.

International Distinction
The IBBY Honor List: a biennial listing of excellent books for children put out by the International Board on Books for Young People.

5. Make sure you cover off as many genres as you can. There are so many kids today who never hear poetry or who don't receive grounding in oral folk-tale culture. That grieves me. In Dewey classification systems, the picture books and easy readers are catalogued separately from poetry, folklore, non-fiction, music, biography and the like. You have to go hunting to move beyond picture books.

6. Give a child free range in the library and work by trial and error. A child needs to know that he/she has some agency when it comes to selecting books. I have read some real howlers to my daughter but I respected the fact that she chose the books. This is where all those dreadful movie spin-off books come into play. There's also a number of didactic or messagey books out there that I flat-out disagree with, but I suck it up and read them anyway if my daughter has taken a fancy to them. I try to not pass judgment while I'm reading a book but I will often discuss my likes and dislikes after the fact. Take, for example, The Rainbow Fish. I personally don't like how preachy that book is. I don't like the message that in order to be liked you must give up all of what it is that makes you unique. I do, however, like fostering notions of sharing and consideration for others and so my daughter and I have talked about what we both did and didn't like about the book. She's a fan but I think her love of the book has more to do with the brightly coloured illustrations than the book's message.

Big Fish and Bigger Fishermen

Who doesn't love a tall tale, a well-spun yarn of daring and determination?

I've recently fallen in love with Kenneth Oppel's Peg books:

Peg and the Whale (illustrated by Terry Widener; Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2000)



Peg and the Yeti (illustrated by Barbara Reid; Haper Collins, 2004).

In them, strapping young Peg sets out to conquer the world. She's pushing seven when her story begins and, well, that Peg, "she want(s) big, she want(s) better, she want(s) best." And what could be better than to catch a whale or to climb to the top of Mount Everest?

Peg hails from Newfoundland, if we are to go by her penchant for salt cod and pork scruncheons. Her narrator definitely has a down-home, east coast lilt. In fact, Oppel's prose sits on the tip of the tongue like it was meant to live there. Reading these books aloud to children is nothing short of a delight. The warmth and whimsy of Oppel's language is matched in the illustrations by Widener and Reid, both of whom use warm oranges, reds and yellows to set Peg off from the daunting cool blues, blacks and whites that surround her. No matter how great the threat to Peg (and that Yeti is some fearsome), the reader can't help but feel the warm comfort that both narration and illustration afford.

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If you're looking for tall tales with regional flair for teens, look no further than New Brunswicker Stuart Trueman's Tall Tales and True Tales from Down East (McClelland and Stewart, 1979.) Trueman won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1969 and it shows in his easy narration of understated wit:

"But the laughing ringmaster, clad in green satin suit, was none other than the dentist Painless Parker. He had bought a marooned circus for 50,000, and was putting it to work advertising him up and down the Pacific coast.

Most surprisingly, he wasn't an American at all. He was a member of a northern race notorious for innate conservatism, stolidity and shyness.

He was a Canadian."

The 22 stories that comprise this collection include Acadian folklore, Mi'kmaq-Malliseet legend, and various bits of Maritime history, personality and lore. If you want to know the full story behind Fredericton's famous Coleman Frog, for instance, you need look no further.

Tall Tales and True Tales from Down East is appropriate for older children, teens and adults alike. The book is out of print but copies abound in Maritime libraries and used copies can be found for purchase online.

It's fall, it's fall. Come one, come all!

The Fredericton fall fair opens this weekend, FREX as it's known around town. I'll be there-- with wet wipes for cotton candy fingers and a camera to capture that perfect wide-eyed merry-go-round moment. Before you head out to your local fall fair, I recommend hitting the library first to find a copy of Merry-Go-Day written by Fredericton native Sheree Fitch and illustrated by long-time Fredericton artist Molly Lamb Bobak (Doubleday, 1991; no longer in print).

The inspiration for the book comes from FREX, specifically, but it is suited to any old fair-going experience. Laid out as a series of poems that walks the reader through the sights and sounds of a day at the fair, the book is as crisp as a McIntosh apple. If you've never read Fitch's tongue tantalizing verse out-loud, Merry-Go-Day is a must for this Labour Day weekend. Here's an excerpt:

"Sam Sam
The hammer slammer
Always rings the bell
When Sam
The hammer-slammer
Hammers
Everybody yells:

Slam that hammer
Sam the slammer
Hammer-slamming Sam
Sam the hammer-slamming
Slamming
Hammer-slamming
Man"

Merry-Go-Day is a perfectly indulgent day out. Fitch takes us on the bumper cars, a roller coaster, and the Ferris Wheel; she feeds us hot dogs, ice cream and cotton candy; we get just a little spooked in the Haunted House; and we play a game of chance. The question is, will we win that purple parrot our heart's desire? You'll have to check the book out to know.

About Mouse-traps and the Moon

I, lucky librarian that I am, get to spend my day with children's books. The collection I curate is the largest of its kind in Atlantic Canada, with holdings that are diverse, as well as serendipitous, built up over time by collection founder and benefactor, Eileen Wallace. A significant collection strength is historical and contemporary Atlantic Canadian Books for Children.

On this blog, I will showcase material from the collection as well as ramble on about children's and YA literature and some of the cultural issues that impinge upon them. As the mother of a pre-schooler, I will also share some of my daughter's lists of favourite books.

As for the title of this blog, it is taken from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll and is spoken by the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party: "mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are 'much of a muchness'--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?"