INTRODUCTION TO

PICTURE BOOKS

LCN617 – Children’s Literature:

Criticism and Practice. 2015.

Erica Hateley – erica.hateley@qut.edu.au

HANDOUT ON BLACKBOARD: “BEGINNING

CRITICAL READING OF A PICTURE BOOK”

What is a picture book?

What are the elements of a picture book? (How do we start talking about picture books?)

How do we begin to critically analyse a picture book?

“The assumption about children is that their imagination is “visual” in a way that gives them an intuitive ability to understand pictorial information. The assumption about pictures is that they are automatically understandable. Neither of these assumptions is true.” (Nodelman and Reimer 275)

WHAT IS A PICTURE BOOK?

At base: a book in

which reading the

words AND pictures

is necessary for a full

understanding of the

text.

HOW EASILY THINGS CAN GO WRONG…

CULTURAL CONTEXTS:

NASA’S “PIONEER PLAQUE” (1972):

WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF A PICTURE BOOK?

Cover – Endpapers – Title Page –

Gutters – Openings

All of these will be taken into account by

the creators of a picture book, and

should be taken into account by critical

readers

Interaction or interplay between words

and pictures really defines the picture-

book genre!: “This jointly transmitted story is not merely the

sum of the meanings of the two media forms,

but it is a story more complex in some ways

than the simple summation of the two partial

stories.” (Agosto 278)

As Moebius suggests: “Between text and

picture, or among pictures themselves, we

may experience a sort of semic slippage,

where word and image seem to send

conflicting, perhaps contradictory messages

about the ‘who’ or the ‘what’ of the story”

(135).

Or, ‘what does a terrible roar look like, anyway?’What about wordless picture books?

VISUAL ELEMENTS:

bleed. A picture 'bleeds' if it extends to the trimmed edge of the

paper.

A picture may bleed on one, two, three or all four edges. The effect suggests a life going on

beyond the confines of the page so that the beholder becomes more of a participant in than a

spectator of the pictured events. (Doonan) N.B. During the rumpus, WTWTA has full-bleed pages!

layout. Refers to the shape, size and arrangement of the

illustrations and the placement of the text throughout the picture book.

Layout plays a crucial role in the psychological effect upon the reader/beholder. The most

formal and traditional arrangement is an entirely separate presentation, with text and

illustration on facing pages of the opening. The resulting visual rhythm, a series of strong

beats, suits the folk and fairy-tale form with its often repetitive structure, stereotypical

characters, and its associations with settling down to hear a good story. The text may be

partly integrated, being superimposed upon the illustration in some instances and set apart

above or below in others. The arrangement which mirrors the inter-relationship of word and

image is offered by the wholly integrated layout, where the segment of text is accommodated

within the composition. […] As to the shape, size and arrangement of the illustrations, the

most static presentation is the plate; the most dynamic is a sequence showing the

character in action over several closely presented frames, and possibly breaking an

individual frame in what looks like a hurry to get out of it. Horizontal banding tends to

suggest the passing of time or journeying. (Doonan)

cf. handout on Blackboard > WTWTA and layout

BUSY, FULL-BLEED

PAGES

(WITH COLLAGE!):

TEXT AND TYPOGRAPHY…

DARKNESS & LIGHT;

RED EQUALS ???

colour. A colour has hue, tone and saturation. hue denotes the different colours found on a scale

ranging through red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo and violet, and is a way of distinguishing one colour from another.

tone denotes the measure or degree of lightness or darkness of a coloured area, regardless of hue. We can separate tone from hue if we think of the area as being somewhere on a scale with absolute white at one extreme and absolute black at the other.

saturation is the term used to describe the degree of purity in a colour. A saturated red, for example, would be full, rich, intense. In painting, white is a saturated pigment. White is not used directly in printing because it is present as the colour of the paper. When we look at a picturebook illustration, a white area will appear very intense. When mixed with black, a colour is said to be greyed or muted or called a shade […]A colour mixed with white is called a tint. When an artist uses watercolour or transparent inks, the white paper has something of the same effect as mixing white with an opaque pigment. (Doonan)

N.B.: Colour as index of emotion/as symbol is culturally and historically specific! e.g. red / white / black in different parts of the world

e.g. “pink is for girls, blue is for boys” – very new!

“children’s literature (like all other literatures) reflects—must reflect—the culture that surrounds/permeates it” (Hunt 18)

DARKNESS AS COMFORT; RED AS AWESOMENESS…

CRITICALLY ANALYSING A PICTURE BOOK:

At the most basic level of approaching literary texts critically, there are a handful of simple questions we can use as a starting point: What kind of story is this? (narrative)

How is this story told? (narration)

Who speaks? (narrator/style/tense etc. AND gender/race/class/age etc.)

Who sees? (focalisation)

Who is spoken about? (object rather than subject of narrative)

By extension, when we are reading visual texts critically, similar questions apply: What does this picture say?

How does the picture say it?

Who sees?

Who is seen?

When dealing specifically with the genre of the picture book, there are further questions: How do words and/or pictures appear on

the page/opening? (layout & design)

Why might they appear this way? (production of meaning)

FIRST- AND THIRD-PERSON NARRATION

INTERTEXTUALITY

MOEBIUS:

THE CODES OF POSITION, SIZE AND

DIMINISHING RETURNS (139)

CODES OF PERSPECTIVE (140)

THE CODES OF THE FRAME AND OF THE

RIGHT AND ROUND (141)

THE CODES OF LINE AND CAPILLARITY (142)

THE CODE OF COLOUR (143)

WTWTA, THE RED TREE, BBBB, SUNDAY

CHUTNEY ALL:

Have a single author/illustrator

Tell a story about an adventure of childhood—adults are present to varying degrees, but all have child protagonists

I think they also tell stories of gendered, raced, and classed childhoods

Have a logic of “home”—the older the protagonist, the further afield they may travel, but home is important – cf. home / away / home again

Travelling in time, space, the imagination?

Experience and Belonging?

What might reading across and between such texts tell us about our understanding of “childhood”?

What might child readers ‘learn’ about what it means to be a child from these stories?

“Reading picture books is akin to Alice’s journey

down the rabbit hole. There is a sense of adventure

as the familiar is often rendered strange. Just when

you think you have found the little golden key to

unlock the mysteries of the text, you are left to

reconsider, to question, perhaps change your

viewpoint. The act of interpreting and making

meaning of a text, let alone one which employs

both words and visuals, is not a simple,

straightforward matter.” (Mallan 209)

DISCUSSION PROMPTS

As a general entrance-point into thinking about picture books as a particular type of reading experience, and our focus texts for this week more particularly, here are some prompts:

What are the formal properties that define a “picture book”? How do the illustrations (individually & combined) contribute to

the kind of story it is?

How do the visual elements contribute to the narration of the story?

From whose perspective are the illustrations pitched?

At whom or what is the reader looking?

How might we begin to read picture books critically?

What kinds of reading challenges do picture books pose (for adults and children)?

Choose one of the picture books we are discussing this week, and re-read it slowly and carefully. Are Moebius’s “codes” useful for you in unpacking how the picture book works? Why/why not?

WORKS CITED:

Agosto, Denise. “One and Inseparable: Interdependent Storytelling in Picture Storybooks.” Children's Literature in Education 30.4 (1999): 267-280.

Doonan, Jane. Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Stroud: Thimble Press, 1993.

Hunt, Peter. “Matters of History.” Children’s Literature. Ed. Peter Hunt. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. 8-22.

Mallan, Kerry. “Reading(s) Beneath the Surface: Using Picture Books to Foster a Critical Aesthetics.” Australian Journal of Language and Literacy 22.3 (1999): 200-211.

Nodelman, Perry & Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 3rd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2003.

Moebius, William. “Introduction to Picture Book Codes.” Children’s Literature: The Development of Criticism. Ed. Peter Hunt. London: Routledge, 1990. 131-147.