THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT PART ONE SHOULD LOOK LIKEPart 1.docx

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT PART ONE SHOULD
LOOK LIKE
Part 1
Illustrators use color strategies when creating book design
(Coats, 2013). Color has subcategories that include hue, tones,
and saturation. Hues can be warm or cool. Warm colors include
red, orange, and yellow while cool colors include purple, blue,
and green. Illustrators normally follow the traditional meanings
associated with a color based on the culture being represented
in the book. For example, if the book were about the western
culture we would associate brown with earthiness and a feeling
of solidity and dependability (Coats, 2013). We would also
associate red with blood, fire, danger, and excitement (Coats,
2013).
Illustrators also use tones to convey feeling. Tone is
the shade of a color. For example, adding black to red will
create a burgundy shade while adding white to the red will
create a pinkish color (Coats, 2013). The illustrator might use
darker tones to convey the idea of mystery or give a sense of
fear. Brighter tones can lighten the mood.
Saturation also refers to hue. Saturation is the
“degree to which the color is pure” (Coats, 2013). In other
words, has the color been mixed with any other colors? Children
under nine prefer fully saturated colors or colors that have not
been mixed with another color. These are bright, bold colors.
When choosing literature, it is important to pay attention to
age-related preferences when building the classroom library.
Shapes in literature can also convey feeling. A
triangle on its base makes the reader feel stable while a triangle
resting on its point in danger of falling over can create an
anxious feeling. Steady horizontal lines cause the feeling of

comfort and stability while vertical lines can make us feel
secure they can also make us feel confined and powerless
(Coats, 2013). Circles create a comforting enclosure and give
the reader a sense of completeness.
Lines, like color and shape, work with the picture to
convey a message. Bright contrasting lines can show energy or
an unstable mood. Lines can separate figures from backgrounds.
Lines can form borders that enclose the picture creating a sense
of safety for the young reader (Coats, 2013). Lines are also used
to show movement in a picture. Curved lines around the
characters feet show motion. Wiggly lines around the character
can indicate shaking or dancing (Coats, 2013). While wavy lines
around the head can convey dizziness, surprise or anger.
The texture is also an important element of the
picture book both regarding representation and the physical
characteristics of the book itself. Brush strokes can give a
feeling of weight or convey a sense of seriousness. Watercolors,
on the other hand, give a light feeling. Physical aspects of
texture are seen in touch and feel books, lift the flap books, or
books that have a simple mechanism that can be manipulated by
the child. Texture engages children because it creates the desire
to touch.
Characters of a story can be represented by icons.
Icons are “line drawings with flat colors that only minimally
depict what they represent (Coats, 2013). An icon is a
simplified image that represents objects, ideas, philosophies,
emotions, or entities (Coats, 2013). Icons can give the character
a universal feel because they are not tied to a specific culture
which can make the picture book more appealing.
For readers to identify with characters within the
story, artists must decide how characters and objects are going
to be positioned, and they must give the reader a specific place
from which to view the scene (Coats, 2013). This is called the
point of view. The point of view can be manipulated for
storytelling purposes. In other words, are you looking down on
the scene conveying authority, or are you looking at the scene

from the same level as the character? Maybe you are looking up
at the character giving the character the authority.
The way the elements are arranged in relation to each
other is the composition (Coats, 2013). The composition
“conveys story information” contributing to the flow of the
book (Coats, 2013). The composition helps the reader to make
judgments regarding the main character. Composition helps the
reader determine if the book is funny or serious. And
composition conveys the setting of the story.
In regards to my picture book, I must make these
disclaimers, one I am in no sense of the word an author and two
artistic abilities do not flow through my body and probably
never will regardless of how much we learned in chapter three
regarding key elements of a good picture book. The colors in
my book are primarily cool consisting of hues of blue. I did not
realize just how many of the scenes contained blue until I was
looking through it after I had finished it. The text said that
children under nine prefer totally saturated colors. My optimal
grade is fourth. The average age of a fourth grader is nine.
Maybe this is one reason why I connect with this age. We are
not as fond of the bright, bold fully saturated colors. The
pictures I chose were in watercolors so did not have the
heaviness associated with oils and brush strokes. Many of my
picture selects have circles incorporated into them. Circles give
the pictures a sense of completeness. Lines in my book were
primarily used to separate colors and figures from the
background. I did not utilize lines to indicate movement. My
picture book has a specific character, so icons are not a part of
my book. The point of view varies from page to page. Some are
looking down, some are from character eye level, and one is
looking up at the character. The composition or flow I was
trying for was moving through the course of a child’s day and
the activities they could engage in ending with the child settling
back in for a night of sweet dreams about what he can do
tomorrow.
https://storybird.com/books/sleep-tight-my-little-

prince/?token=26g2wj4xet
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A STORYBOOK. JUST COPY
AND PAST THE LINK IN THE SEARCH BAR AND THE
BOOK WILL COME UP.
THIS IS THE REFERENCE FOR THE CHAPTERS ATTACHED
FROM THE TEXT BOOK THE ONLY SOURCE NEEDED
References
Coats, K. (2013). Children's literature & the developing
reader. Electronic Version. Retrieved from
https://content.ashford.edu/
Part 2
The Seven Basic Plots
Plot
Book Title/Author 1
Book Title/Author 2
Book Title/Author 3
Overcoming the Monster
Jack and the Beanstalk
-Nick Sharrat

The Selfish Giant
-Oscar Wilde
The Lion King
-Disney
Rags to Riches
Cinderella
-Disney
Beauty and the Beast
-Disney
Odd Dog Out
-Rob Biddulph
The Quest
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
-C.W. Lewis
Harry Potter
-J.K. Rowling
The Tale of Desperaux
-Kate DiCamillo
Voyage and Return
Where the Wild Things Are
-Maurice Sendak
The Quest for Paradise
-Geronimo Stilton
The Gruffalo
-Julia Donaldson
Comedy
Don’t let the Pigeon Drive the bus!
-Mo Willems
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that type

-Doreen Cronin
Diary of a Worm
-Doreen Cronin
Tragedy
Ladder to The Moon
-Maya Soeturor-Ng
Charlotte’s Web
-E.B. White
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
-C.S. Lewis
Rebirth
Flip, Flap, Fly!
-Phyllis Root
Planting a Rainbow
-Lois Ehlert
Charlotte’s Web
-E.B. White
The Seven Basic Plots
Plot
Book Title/Author 1
Book Title/Author 2
Book Title/Author 3
Overcoming the Monster
Rags to Riches

The Quest
Voyage and Return
Comedy
Tragedy
Rebirth
4.2 What Is a Story?

Babe is a clear example of a well-made story: It centers on a
character readers care about, places that character in a clearly
identifiable conflict, provides him with helpers and detractors,
builds suspense, and releases that suspense in a triumphant
moment that resolves the conflict. It also features an uplifting
moral that corresponds to several of the developmental projects
of early childhood: the need to establish trust in the world, and
the need to establish autonomy, take initiative, and assert
yourself. It also contains themes that are important to older
children as they develop and encounter more complex problems
and situations that cause them to question what makes life
meaningful. It offers a very reassuring message about our
ability to triumph over death and meaninglessness through
exercising our particular gifts.
Every day, stuff happens. Just like adults, children have desires
and needs, and we all try to fulfill them: We eat, we sleep, we
love, we hate, we complain, we worship, we work, we play, we
cry, we laugh. Through it all, we try to make sense of the things
that happen. Throughout human history, the most persistent way
we have tried to put things into some meaningful order or
context is through stories. As individuals and in societies, we
want to be able to predict future events, avoid pain and
unpleasantness, and solve problems. We want to remember
things that happen and people we have lost. We want to know
why things happen and why the world works the way it does.
We want to explain ourselves. We want to imagine other worlds
and possible futures. We want to pass on our values and our
knowledge to future generations.
These projects are no less urgent for young children than they
are for adults. As I have noted throughout this book, we have to
remember how new the world is for children and how they must
work to make sense of it. Gordon Wells, a professor who
specializes in language and learning, argues that "storying" is

how we do that:
Rarely, if ever, do we have all the necessary visual or other
sensory information to decide unambiguously what it is we are
seeing, hearing, or touching. Instead we draw on our mental
model of the world to construct a story that would be plausible
in the context and use that to check the data of sense against the
predictions that the story makes possible. (1986, p. 195)
Wells explains that the process works like this: From infancy,
children construct mental models based on what happens
repeatedly in their environments. They use these mental models
to put things into categories of experience, like things that live
in my crib, or what Mommy does when we are getting ready to
go outside. When they encounter a new experience, they don't
approach it with an "open mind," that is, with no preset
understandings. Rather they put things into their already
established mental categories (their stories) and then see if their
experience fits within those stories. When it doesn't, they make
adjustments to their mental models to accommodate the new
experiences.
We help in that process of meaning making by passing along
stories that explain the world to children. Our stories put
experiences into broader contexts, contexts that children may
not have imagined before. Our stories also have a more defined
shape than simple organizational categories. Instead, the stories
we share have temporal sequences—beginnings, middles, and
ends—and link up causes and effects. By telling a story, we can
help children look at an event or relationship from the outside
and see how their behavior might have led to a specific outcome
or how their relationships fit into a pattern that they may or may
not like. Stories have a shaped, ordered, finished quality that
tames an experience by making it smaller so that we can see it
whole; this makes the world a more manageable place because it
divides it up into chunks of time and experience, much like

chapters or episodes. On the other hand, stories can help us
imagine alternatives to everyday life, and this makes the world
bigger, gives it more possibilities.
Children are not born storytellers; this is one more thing they
need to learn in order to become fully human. Fortunate
children grow up surrounded by storytellers, though. Just like
we provide special spaces for their bodies to help them make
the physical world more manageable, we provide stories to
furnish and shape their minds. Parents, teachers, siblings,
friends all tell stories, and children often learn the form of
stories before they learn the meanings behind them. They learn
these patterns from the music of our voices—our storytelling
voices are different from our everyday voices, more
intentionally rhythmic, more animated—and also from the
ritualized use of specific words and phrases to begin and end
stories that children learn through repetition. For instance, they
know how a story begins: "Once upon a time . . ." "Long ago
and far away . . ." "I remember when . . ." "That reminds me of
the time. . . ." They know how a story ends: "They all lived
happily ever after," "That's why things are the way they are
today," "If they haven't died, they are living still." But what
happens in between?
Plot and Conflict
The plot of a story is the sequence of events that happen in a
story. In order for a story to be successful, the plot has to have
an identifiable shape. Most stories start with some form of
exposition so that readers know something about where the
story begins. That is, we need to be grounded somehow. Maybe
we are introduced to a character or the setting. Very soon,
however, we need a narrative hook. Something has to happen to
get us interested, like Babe's being taken out of the piggery or
Max being sent to his room in Where the Wild Things Are.
Stories that spend too much time establishing the world or the
characters without anything actually happening are generally
not successful as children's books, but stories that start without

giving us any context can be confusing. Striking a balance is
key.
The first line of Charlotte's Web, for instance, is a super
example of a narrative hook. "'Where's Papa going with that
ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for
breakfast" (White, 1952, p. 1). Excellent question, and one that
draws reader's attention immediately, as well as introducing the
character and the situation. In his original plan for the book, E.
B. White thought of starting with a description of the barn that
Wilbur eventually goes to live in (Neumeyer 1994, p. xxix). If it
had, we wouldn't have had the sense of urgency that fills the
entire first chapter until Fern manages to convince her father
not to kill the runt pig who eventually becomes known as
Wilbur.
Usually, the narrative hook introduces the problem, or conflict,
of the story. Here again, conflict is as important as action in a
story, especially for children. Very young children may tolerate
the narration of a chicken's walk around a farmyard where
nothing goes wrong if the book has interesting pictures to look
at, but a story without a conflict isn't really a story at all—it's a
vignette, or a sketch. That is, if Rosie's Walk (Hutchins, 1971)
did not have the pictures of the fox's unsuccessful attempts to
capture her, it would be a very dull story indeed. Even Kevin
Henkes's Little White Rabbit (2011), which is a very quiet story
about a rabbit who imagines what it would be like to be
different things—green like the grass or tall like the fir trees—
has a moment of conflict and excitement when the rabbit comes
unexpectedly upon a cat. A story needs a problem to solve.
Plot Categories by Content
There are multiple models for how plots work. Some are
content-based, arguing that there are certain generic plots that
storytellers use over and over again as a repertoire (Nodelman
& Reimer, 2002). The number and content of these plots varies,
and there is much controversy over the theory, but the idea

helps us think about the structural similarities of the kinds of
plots we like and the kinds that children will like. Christopher
Booker, a British journalist (2005), for instance, has made an
exhaustive study of what many writers agree are seven basic
plots:
Overcoming the Monster: The hero learns of a great evil and
sets out to destroy it.
Rags to Riches: Surrounded by dark forces who wish him or her
ill, the protagonist eventually overcomes the evil and gets
riches, a kingdom, and a mate.
The Quest: The hero learns of a great boon and sets out to find
it.
Voyage and Return: The protagonist journeys to a far-off land
where he or she triumphs and returns home with a more mature
outlook.
Comedy: The hero and heroine are being kept apart by some
dark force. The dark force is defeated and the couple reunites.
Tragedy: The protagonist is really a villain, and the story
involves his or her spiral into destruction.
Rebirth: Follows the same trajectory as a tragedy, except the
hero repents and is rehabilitated.
Some plots of children's books fit neatly into one of these
categories. For instance, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum,
1900), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 1865), and
Peter Pan (Barrie, 1911) are all Voyage and Return stories. In
fact, children's literature scholars Perry Nodelman and Mavis
Reimer (2002) argue that the Voyage and Return plot is the
most prevalent of all the plots in children's literature. However,
other plots are evident. Traditional versions of "The Three
Little Pigs" are clearly Overcoming the Monster stories. Where
the Wild Things Are also fits that category, as Max overcomes
his own inner monsters.
Some stories combine elements of several of the basic plots. For
instance, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" combines

elements of Rags to Riches with elements of Comedy. Babe has
elements of the Quest, but also of Comedy, if we consider that
Rex and Fly are driven apart by Rex's jealousy and reunited by
Babe's victory. The Tragedy plot is the one least likely to be
found in children's stories, as it is rare to present a protagonist
who is really a villain to children without rehabilitating him at
some point. The Abominable Snowman in the Rankin/Bass
production of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) and Dr.
Seuss's Grinch (1957) are both cases in point; although they
start the story as villains, they are reformed by the end.
In addition to content categories, plots come in different shapes
or structures. Like the content categories, sometimes these
structures overlap.
Cumulative Plots
Oftentimes, the problem shapes the plot. For instance, the
problem could be one that leads to other problems, which
results in a cumulative plot structure. For instance, in the book
based on the folk song There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed
a Fly (Taback, 1997), the woman swallows one animal after
another to chase the previous one. Suspense mounts as each
animal gets bigger until the inevitable happens: The old woman
swallows a horse and dies. A similar cumulative structure can
be found in the traditional story The Mitten (adapted and
illustrated by Jan Brett, 1989), where a boy loses his mitten in
the forest and animals take up residence in it for warmth. The
first animal is always very small—a mouse in some versions, a
mole in others, but the animals get gradually bigger until the
mitten rips. These sorts of stories play on the concepts of
repetition and elaboration, and they often suggest a theme of
how small problems grow into big ones if they aren't solved.
Generally, they are funny, and they are great to use for drama
activities with children acting out the cumulative plot. They
also promote confident reading through the use of repetition.
The following are stories with cumulative plots:
Stories With Cumulative Plots

Arnold, K. Knock, Knock, Termok! (1995)
Bishop, Gavin. Chicken Licken. (1987)
Brett, Jan. The Mitten. (1989)
Brisson, Pat. Benny's Pennies. (1995)
Burningham, John, Mr. Grumpy's Outing. (1995)
Carle, Eric. Today is Monday. (1993)
Cole, Henry. Jack's Garden. (1997)
Cole, Joanna. It's Too Noisy. (1992)
Donaldson, Julia. A Squash and a Squeeze. (2005)
Dunbar, Joyce. Seven Sillies. (1999)
Hutchins, Pat. Little Pink Pig. (2000)
Lobel, Arnold. The Rose in My Garden. (1993)
Neitzel, Shirley, and Parker, Nancy Winslow. The Bag I'm Taki
ng to Grandma's. (1998)
Sloat, Teri, and Bernard, Nadine. The Thing That Bothered Far
mer Brown. (2001)
Tolstoy, Alexei, and Goto, Scott. The Enormous Turnip. (2003)
Taback, Simms, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.
(1997)
Waddell, Martin, and Barton, Jill. The Pig in the Pond. (1996)
West, Colin. "I Don't Care!" Said the Bear. (1997)
Wood, Audrey, and Wood, Don. King Bidgood's in the Bathtub.
(1985)
Climactic Plots
Another way of organizing a plot centers on a conflict that leads
to a climax or crisis—a moment where the tension breaks and
the conflict is decided one way or the other. This is called a
climactic plot structure (Figure 4.1). Instead of using repetition,
the conflict escalates through some sort of rising action.
Cumulative plots can build to climaxes, such as in The Mitten,
when the mitten strains to bursting and all of the animals have
to leave. However, they don't have to end in climaxes; their
structures can simply build to happy chaos without tension. Nor
does rising action have to be cumulative; complications in the
rising action can be unrelated to each other, as they are in Babe.

The difference is that in climactic structures, tension and
suspense builds until it breaks. In Maurice Sendak's Where the
Wild Things Are (1963), the height of the action is the wild
rumpus in the land where the wild things are. It breaks the
tension that has been building throughout the book and leads to
the resolution. Following the climax, Max calls an end to the
festivities and heads home.
Another book with a climactic plot structure is Kevin Henkes's
Owen (1993). The establishing shot of Owen playing peacefully
in his yard is immediately interrupted by the words on the first
page, where the nosy neighbor, Mrs. Tweezers, tells Owen's
parents that it is time for Owen to give up his blanket. That's
the narrative hook that introduces the conflict. The rising
action, or complications, involves Owen's parents trying various
means suggested by Mrs. Tweezers to separate Owen from his
blanket, but Owen always succeeds in thwarting their plans.
Finally, though, the climax occurs when Owen's mother cuts his
blanket into handkerchiefs. This solves the problem to
everyone's satisfaction and thus leads to a happy resolution of
the conflict.
A climactic plot is often pictured as a witch's hat. The flat brim
of exposition takes off at the narrative hook up a steep slope of
rising action, peaks at the climax, follows an equally long
downward slope of falling action, and then levels off again in
the resolution. This is a useful model for teaching story
structure to children and for helping them develop their own
stories when they begin to tell and write them. But most books,
including children's books, are usually not that symmetrical.
First, as noted earlier, children don't often have patience for too
much exposition before the action starts. Likewise, once the
problem is solved, the story is effectively over, so the falling
action and resolution are often quite quick. But each of these
elements is necessary in order for the story to feel whole and
complete.

Episodic Plots
Books for emerging independent readers most often favor
episodic plot structures (see Figure 4.2). Rather than track one
conflict over the entire book, these books feature mini-climactic
plots in each chapter. This is important for young children,
because it builds on what they are already familiar with. New
readers have learned to follow a climactic plot structure over a
32-page picturebook, but it would be daunting to jump right into
a book that stretches the suspense out over a hundred pages.
Children's brains have not yet sufficiently developed to process
complex relationships of cause and effect, but if the
consequences for an action are immediate and concrete, they get
it.
Hence the authors of books like the Ramona, the Alvin Ho, and
the Ivy and Bean series plot their books by creating short
episodes that follow the basic pattern of exposition, narrative
hook, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
However, the best authors guide their readers toward mastering
a longer narrative by making each episode relate to a larger
conflict that dominates the story. For instance, in Alvin Ho:
Allergic to Dead Bodies, Funerals, and other Fatal
Circumstances (Look, 2011), Alvin impetuously volunteers to
accompany his grandfather to his grandfather's best friend's
funeral. He regrets his offer, immediately. He is too scared to
go and too scared to tell his grandfather that he's scared.
Meanwhile, he is afraid that his grandfather will also die.
In addition to Alvin's immediate problem in this particular
book, he suffers from a social anxiety disorder that renders him
unable to talk at all in school. In one chapter, Alvin's fear of
talking leads to a comical episode where his teachers
misunderstand the situation and think his grandfather is actually
dead. They orchestrate a memorial service that ends in chaos
when Alvin's grandfather walks in the door. While the episode
is very funny and self-contained, it relates to the larger
problems of Alvin having to attend a funeral and his fears that

his grandfather will die.
Types of Conflicts
The conflicts in children's books need to be centered on
children's experiences, and they need to be problems that
children can see an end to or at least be able to find a method of
coping if the problem itself cannot be resolved. In traditional
literary study, the core conflicts are categorized in terms of
abstract struggles of a fictional character:
· character vs. character
· character vs. society
· character vs. nature
· character vs. self
· character vs. the supernatural
· character vs. technology or machines
Children's literature makes these basic sorts of conflicts
relevant to children by relating them to common childhood
experience.
Mastering fear of the dark, for instance, would be a character
vs. self conflict, as would mastering one's angry impulses, as in
Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and When Sophie Gets
Angry—Really, Really Angry (2004). Books that focus on
sibling rivalry can demonstrate a character vs. character or a
character vs. self conflict, depending on whether the sibling is
actively trying to thwart the main character or the main
character is simply jealous of the new sibling's arrival.
As we noted previously, the main conflict in Babe is character
vs. society, but we can also see character vs. technology, as
both Farmer Hoggett and Ferdinand resist attempts at
modernization, exemplified by the alarm clock and the fax
machine. Paul Fleischman's Weslandia (2002) offers a firm
example of character vs. society, as Wesley rejects the values of
his peers and forms his own civilization. David Shannon's A
Bad Case of Stripes (2007) offers a more complex example that
combines character vs. the self with character vs. society.

Camilla Cream desperately wants to fit in with her peers at first,
so she denies her love of lima beans, but in the end she has to
take a stand against her society in order to reclaim her sense of
self.
Children's books that confront natural disasters and frightening
weather events, such as Jonathan London's Hurricane! (1998),
Darlene Bailey Beard's Twister (2003), and Karen Hesse's Come
on, Rain! (1999) often treat the character's inner struggles with
fear as much as they demonstrate a character vs. nature conflict.
Chapter books suitable for read-alouds with third graders such
as Jewell Parker Rhodes' Ninth Ward (2010) and Brenda Woods'
Saint Louis Armstrong Beach (2011) help children understand
both the emotional and the physical conflicts that emerge when
characters are faced with the devastation nature can inflict on
communities.
Identifying these types of conflicts is an activity that can help
school-aged children (grades 1–3) analyze what is called story
grammar, that is, all of the elements that go into a story and
how they are arranged. For a way to introduce and teach this
concept, see the Teaching Ideas at the end of this chapter. But
just talking about the problem in the book will help them see
how it might relate to their own experiences. Common problems
in children's books are the same as common problems in
children's lives: sibling rivalry, toilet teaching, giving up a
beloved blanket or stuffed animal, losing a loved one, mastering
negative emotions, learning a new skill, entering school,
figuring out identity, and so forth.
Before reading Owen, for instance, you might ask students
whether they have a blanket or a favorite stuffed animal that
they couldn't bring to school with them. Talk a little bit about
how they feel about the problem, and then read the story and
ask what they think about Owen's parents' solution. Then read
similarly themed books, such as Something From Nothing and

Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny (2004), and ask students to
compare the books to each other and to their own experiences.
Pay attention to the conflicts that children bring with them to
school, the things they talk about that are bothering them, and
find books to help them find solutions or at least solidarity in
their conflict.
Character
As we noted in Chapter 1, characters in children's books are
often iconic—that is, they are drawn as types so that children
who don't look like them can relate to them anyway. The fewer
details in a face, the more people the figure could possibly look
like. The same concept can also be used in developing a
character's personality.
Max, in Where the Wild Things Are, is a particular boy, but his
face is drawn in such a way so that many children can relate to
him; he is mostly defined by his expressions, which most
children replicate. As a character, all we really know about him
is that he has a mom and a dog, lives in a house where he has
his own bedroom, likes to eat hot food, and has a vivid
imagination. These scanty details enable Max to be a sort of
"everychild," which is one of the reasons why his story remains
popular nearly 50 years after it was published.
Peter in Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day (1963, available to
be read online at http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/the-snowy-
day) functions similarly; his figure is depicted mostly as shape
and color, with very few facial details except that he is clearly
African American, and his character is developed by his actions.
He is excited to see the snow, active and curious as he plays,
realistic about his chances of playing with older boys, talkative
with his mother, thoughtful in his bath, and naïve about the
ability to keep a snowball in his pocket. These sorts of
"universal" characters enable children to relate to their

adventures rather than being distanced by details that make the
characters into distinct children.
In early chapter books, characters are more fully developed in
words, and less so through pictures. This is where all of their
early training in multiliteracies becomes important to help them
understand what they read. Here is how Annie Barrows (2006)
describes her characters in Ivy and Bean:
Ivy sat nicely on her front steps. Bean zipped around her yard
and yelled. Ivy had long, curly red hair pushed back with a
sparkly headband. Bean's hair was black, and it only came to
her chin because it got tangled if it was any longer. When Bean
put on a headband, it fell off. Ivy wore a dress every day. Bean
wore a dress when her mother made her. Ivy was always reading
a big book. Bean never read big books. Reading made her
jumpy. (pp. 8–9)
From these descriptions of what the characters wear and look
like (visual), how they move (gestural), where they like to sit or
play (spatial), and how they feel about reading (linguistic),
readers have to make inferences about which girl they might
like and which one is most like them. They plug these
descriptions into mental models and start making predictions
that carry them into the world of the story. The descriptions are
general enough to allow them to make identifications, but
specific enough for the readers to be able to tell which character
is which and predict how they might respond to situations.
Protagonists, Antagonists, and Secondary Characters
The main character of a story is called the protagonist.
Sometimes in stories with character vs. character conflict there
is another character who acts as the antagonist, who creates the
obstacles that keep the protagonist from getting what he or she
wants. Depending on the conflict, however, there may not be a
clear antagonist. Instead, there are usually secondary characters

who help the main character or just fill out the character's
world. Sometimes these secondary characters are there to
provide humor; sometimes they help us get to know the main
character.
Round and Flat Characters
Readers get to know characters by various means. We learn
about them through the way they dress and hold themselves in
the pictures, the way they talk, the way they treat other
characters, and the way other characters treat them. Characters
who have multiple traits and facets are called round characters,
while characters who have only one characteristic are called flat
characters.
Main characters are usually round, while antagonists are often
flat, unless the author wants to solve the conflict by having the
protagonist and antagonist become friends. In that case, the
antagonist must have some good qualities to balance out the
ones that caused the conflict. Otherwise, keeping the antagonist
flat is a device authors use to keep the sides of the conflict
simple: protagonist good, antagonist bad. For instance, in
traditional versions of "The Three Little Pigs" (listen to a
traditional version here), the characters are all flat. The brother
who builds his house from bricks is the protagonist, and the
wolf is the antagonist. The foolish brothers are secondary
characters included in the story to teach a lesson. So when the
wolf gobbles them up after blowing their houses down, his evil
nature is conveyed without too much grief on the part of the
audience. But in nontraditional versions where the wolf is
supposed to be more sympathetic, such as the parody, The True
Story of the Three Little Pigs, by John Scieszka and Lane Smith
(1996), the wolf is a round character, with fully developed
reasons why his story has been misunderstood.
Dynamic and Static Characters
Another important quality to bear in mind while analyzing

characters is whether or not they grow or change over the
course of the story. Characters who grow by learning a lesson or
mastering an emotion are called dynamic characters. Their
growth is called the character arc. Characters who remain the
same over the course of the story are called static characters.
Winnie the Pooh and his friends are good examples of static
characters. They don't grow or change over the course of their
books, while Christopher Robin does; he learns new things and
eventually leaves them to go to school, so he is a dynamic
character.
This reflects A. A. Milne's ideology of childhood, which is
obviously shared by many of us as evidenced by the lasting
popularity of his books and characters: We like to think that
childhood as an idea remains the same even if we ourselves
grow out of it. For children, Pooh and the other animals help
them negotiate that sense of change and growth by providing a
stable, unchanging environment that will still be there if they
need to come back to it. This is very similar to the conflict that
is worked out over the course of the three Toy Story movies as
well.
Different Characters for Different Reading Purposes
In judging quality in terms of characters, it is not necessarily
true that books with round, dynamic characters are better than
books that feature flat, static ones. If that were the case, we
would be dismissing most folk literature as bad. But folk stories
are very useful to developing readers in understanding their own
character traits and conflicts, as well as what traits their culture
values and devalues.
In other words, child readers don't necessarily need
psychologically complex characters in order to develop more
psychological complexity themselves. Here, as in most cases of
evaluation, we need to think about the age of the child and what
the story is useful for. Static, flat characters are often good for

reading about when children are going through traumatic
situations or changes themselves. Characters like Pooh, Brer
Rabbit, Elephant and Piggie (Willems, 2007) and Bink and
Gollie (DiCamillo, McGhee, and Fucile, 2010) are comforting
because children know what to expect from them. However,
when children are beginning to show signs of boredom within
themselves, introducing books with round, dynamic characters
such as Ramona or Ivy and Bean, can help them chart a path
forward in their personal development.
Setting
When and where a book takes place is called its setting. Setting
is often the most important way that an author establishes the
mood or tone of the story. It also helps in the development of
spatial literacy as readers observe characters interacting with
their various environments.
Because children make sense of books by bringing their
knowledge of the world into their reading and then adjusting
their knowledge of the world through what they read, texts set
in different places do a lot of cultural and personal work. They
remind us, for instance, that children grow up in all sorts of
settings and that an ideal childhood can be lived anywhere, if it
even exists. Urban stories capture the attention of urban
children by looking like the environments they see around them.
Rural and suburban settings introduce different kinds of
experiences. Through books, children can expand their
understanding of the world no matter where they live.
Attending to setting from a comparative perspective helps foster
a child's spatial literacy. For instance, comparing the world of
the book with the world children live in helps them understand
the special qualities of their own time and place. Focusing on
pictorial details of books set in the past or elsewhere in the
world and asking students to compare the clothing, housing,

landscapes, and other setting indicators with their own
environments will help them notice the unique features of their
everyday surroundings, and understand that others in the world
live and have lived differently.
The important thing for teachers is to make sure they choose
books that present a variety of settings so that children's
experiences can be both affirmed through similarities and
expanded through differences.
Theme
The theme of a book is its main conceptual idea—the point it is
trying to communicate. When grownups are asked what a
children's book is about, they will most often state the theme,
what the book seems to be about. For instance, they are likely to
say that Dr. Seuss's The Lorax (1972) is about
environmentalism and the dangers of deforestation and
corporate irresponsibility. Children, however, think in terms of
details. For them, The Lorax is about a grumpy little orange
creature who keeps yelling at the guy who makes the thneeds.
They might get the tone of the book as well by discussing the
way the colors make them feel, the style of the pictures or the
expressions of the characters, or the way the language works.
The Lorax always looks sad or angry, and he often yells, so
even though the book has comical-looking pictures, children
will sense that this is not a funny book.
But it is important to remember that the subject of a book is not
the same as the plot, and that the subject and plot are not the
same as the theme. Each level of understanding represents a
higher order of thinking and abstraction. In the case of the
Lorax, the subject is a boy wanting to know why his town is so
polluted. The plot tells the story of the Once-ler who came to
town and harvested the Truffula trees to make thneeds, ignored
the warnings of the Lorax, and destroyed the environment

through his greed. The theme is that this sort of environmental
destruction is caused by corporate greed and can be prevented
or reversed if people pay attention to the damage they are
causing. This is driven home by the Once-ler giving the boy the
last Truffula seed to plant and nurture.
Moreover, there are implicit themes that emerge as well as
explicit ones. The explicit theme of H. A. and Margret Rey's
Curious George (1941), for instance, may well be that little
monkeys are happiest in zoos (it is a product of its time, after
all). But there are multiple implicit themes as well, depending
on how you view the characters in the book. My students, for
instance, often see the Man in the Yellow Hat as a neglectful
parent who can't handle his child's mischief, so he sends him
away. There are also implicit racist themes throughout the book
communicated through the fact that George is from Africa and
is surrounded by White people. Whenever he tries to act like
them, he fails, and ultimately ends up incarcerated. The fun and
adventures that Curious George has throughout the book may
implicitly communicate the theme that bad behavior is worth the
consequences, or the outrageous consequences of Curious
George's actions may communicate to still others that curiosity
is best curbed. Any of these themes is possible depending on the
experiences and dispositions the reader brings to the text.
Given this potential confusion of thematic messages, it is
tempting to say that the best way to evaluate a book based on its
theme is to consider how clearly the theme is communicated.
The problem here is that books for which the theme is more
important than the entertainment can be preachy and boring.
Look for books that entertain as they instruct. For instance,
many of Dr. Seuss's books are very message-driven, but the
messages are couched in interesting stories.
On the other hand, don't shy away from books whose themes are
not immediately clear. Instead, talk with children about their

experience of the book. Children as young as 4 or 5 can be
engaged in discussion about the theme of a book if questions are
scaffolded through the book's details. Ask them what they
thought the book was about, what the main problem was, how it
was solved, and whether they thought it was a good solution.
Oftentimes, letting children respond to a book by drawing a
picture or acting out a scene helps them communicate what they
found was most important or confusing or interesting about a
book. This will help them figure out what theme was most
important to them and also help them develop the skill of
responding to a book thoughtfully rather than hunting for an
author's message.
3.1 A Word (or Several) About Author's Intentions
At this point, students usually ask whether the author or
illustrator makes the decision to turn the little engine around
intentionally or whether we are "reading too much into it." It's a
good question and one we can't really answer without asking the
author or illustrator. It might be more helpful to consider that
much of what each of us does every day is unintentional, but it
is guided by norms of behavior and cultural know-how. As we
grow up in a culture, we internalize its codes, values, and
beliefs. Our ways of talking, moving, and seeing are all
developed in a specific culture at a specific time. And in fact,
the literature that we read and the way we are exposed to it
helps us learn those cultural codes.
So for Watty Piper and his original illustrators, George and
Doris Hauman, having grown up in a culture that reads from left
to right, it probably made intuitive sense to orient the train the
way they did when they wanted to indicate that it was making
progress, and then to reorient it when they wanted to show that
there was a problem. Just by living in a culture, they had
developed visual, gestural, and spatial literacies specific to their

culture, and they combined these ways of seeing to create
multimodal metaphors of making and not making progress. So
the first answer to the question of whether an author or
illustrator intends to put a meaning into a work is that authors
and illustrators always act out of a knowledge, conscious or not,
of the codes of their culture.
The second answer to that question comes from the theory of
reader response criticism. In the late 1960s, Roland Barthes
wrote an article called "The Death of the Author" (1977) in
which he claimed that an author's intentions, background, or
biography doesn't matter at all when it came to interpreting a
text. Instead, what really matters is how the reader sees the text.
Similarly, in 1978, Louise Rosenblatt argued that reading was
not a fishing expedition, where the reader was looking for the
single, correct meaning hidden under the surface of a text by a
cagey author, but was instead a transaction between the reader
and the book. In the process of this transaction, both readers
and texts are changed, as readers bring their understanding of
the world to the text, and the text enhances their understanding
of the world. Thus, the second answer is that the author's
intentions matter less than the way readers interpret the text in
light of their own experience, especially the experience they are
having while they are reading the book.
When my daughter was 3, she picked up a copy of Stellaluna
(Cannon, 1993) that I was then teaching in a Literature for
Young Children class. I hadn't read it to her yet, so I let her
look through the pictures and tell me what she thought the book
was about. "Oh," she said, "it's about a bird who has to leave
her mother and go to school. But she makes friends at school so
it's okay. Then she sees her mother when school is over."
What actually happens in Stellaluna is that Stellaluna's mother,
who is a bat, drops her during a fight with an owl. Stellaluna
lands in a bird's nest with three baby birds in it, where, after
some initial trouble with Mama Bird, she learns to live like a

bird. When she and the three baby birds in the nest all learn to
fly, Stellaluna comes across a group of bats and finds her
mother. She is excited to be among bats again and helps save
her bird friends when they try to fly at night.
My daughter's interpretation of the story followed the basic
trajectory of events—a child gets separated from her mother,
enters a world of peers, and then reunites with her mother at the
end—but placed them into what she was doing at the time, that
is, leaving home for the first time to enter preschool. Her reader
response transaction with the book required her to bring her
idea of what school would be like and map it onto a crowded
bird's nest with a single adult presiding, and the book helped
her cope with her anxiety of attending school for the first time
by providing a comforting narrative of finding friends and
returning to Mom at the end. Because she had no context for
understanding the difference between a bird and a bat, that
detail became irrelevant for her, even though it is a very
important theme in the book.
Both Rosenblatt's and Barthes' work was largely a reaction
against the idea that books have one single meaning—the one
that the author intended—and that the job of the reader is
simply to figure out what that meaning is. Rosenblatt and
Barthes argued for reading as a more interactive experience.
Readers, even very young ones like my daughter, bring their
own experiences to a book, and their interpretations and
responses are colored by those experiences. The book becomes
meaningful to them as a result of this interaction between what
they already know and what the book introduces. This
transaction forms the basis of reader response criticism.
Children's Books Intended to Teach a Lesson
Before we move on from the question of whether an author's
intentions matter in analyzing a book, though, we should pay
some attention to books where the author's intentions are

impossible to miss: the dreaded didactic children's book. The
word didactic refers to instruction, so a didactic book is one
that is mainly focused on teaching a lesson. I think we can agree
that nobody likes to be preached to. We can probably also agree
that stories that focus too much on teaching a lesson are usually
bland and boring; this was the main problem identified by
Hersey (1954) in his article on why children weren't learning to
read in schools—their books were too boring and focused too
much on good children always choosing to do the right thing.
At the same time, though, we need to remember that a children's
book is always didactic—that is, it always teaches something
about the way the world works to its intended audience. For
children, the world is new, and they are remarkably open to
whatever adults tell them about how it works, at least until they
develop the cognitive and emotional capacities to entertain
doubt and skepticism. So while it may not be the author's
intention to teach them some lesson, children nonetheless take
one away based on what caused the conflict in the story and
how it is resolved.
But authors are not completely innocent in this transaction.
While many say, "Hey, I was just telling a story, not trying to
teach a lesson," they still selected which story they wanted to
tell and decided who would win and who would lose in the end.
Walt Disney once said, for instance, "We just make the pictures,
and let the professors tell us what they mean" (quoted in Bell,
Haas, & Sells, 1995, p. 1), and think of what children learn
about the world from the films that come out of that studio.
Consider, for instance, what girls and boys learn about romantic
relationships from The Little Mermaid. Read the lyrics to
Ursula's song when she is trying to get Ariel to give up her
voice here. Still, at least with that perspective, the authors are
focusing on the quality of the story they want to tell. Other
authors and purveyors of children's literature are more openly
agenda driven; they want children to think a certain way about

gender, manners, the environment, or some other issue, and
their storytelling takes a back seat.
A rule of thumb, then: if a book makes you feel preached to, it
will have that effect on child readers as well. If, on the other
hand, you feel swept up in a good story, then you will want to
step back at some point and take a more objective look at what
sorts of messages are being conveyed through the story.
How to Share a Book With a Baby
As noted, a very young child encountering a book may not
necessarily know what a book is for or how it works. That
doesn't mean that we shouldn't share books with infants. In fact,
book sharing with very young children is particularly important
in these days when children are likely to have more access to
television and electronic devices than to actual books. (For a
humorous take on this problem in contemporary culture, see the
book trailer for Lane Smith's It's a Book here.) The key is adult
interaction and responsiveness.
Sharing a book with a child, like telling a story, or singing an
action song, should be an interactive experience as the adult and
the child develop a habit of shared attention. As the adult points
to a picture, the child follows the pointed finger and begins to
put together the special qualities of the book as a particular
kind of object. Soon, the child will begin to do the pointing, and
the adult should follow the child's lead in discovering and
talking about the pictures on the page.
Early print awareness spawns intellectual curiosity, and it's not
difficult, because it builds on preferences that children already
have. Research shows that infants as young as 4 months old will
look at a picture ("What do babies think," 2012; Winner, 1982).
In fact, they prefer a picture of something they have never seen
before over a picture of something that is familiar. However,
children do not make the connection between the picture and the

thing it represents until they are nearly 2 years old (Piaget,
1963; Winner, 1982, pp. 114–116). So, for infants, the book is
an object just like any other object in their world, and they will
enjoy looking at it and the pictures inside it simply for the joy
of looking at something new. Interaction with adults helps them
start to name and understand what they are seeing and make
connections between pictures in books and objects and concepts
in the real world.
3.2 The Elements of Picturebook Art
It takes time, careful attention, and some specialized knowledge
to analyze how a picturebook works, but this kind of work
enriches our understanding of why a book is good or why we or
our children may like it even if it isn't. More importantly, this is
information that we can teach children who are ready to learn it
so that we can help them become competent in visual, spatial,
and gestural literacies. As we go through the elements of
picturebook art, it will be helpful for you to have a selection of
picturebooks on hand to look at. Stop now and collect four or
five books to have nearby.
Color
Color is probably the most significant characteristic of
picturebooks. Color has three elements or aspects: hue, tone or
shade, and saturation.
Hue
Hue refers to the color itself, that is, its position on the color
spectrum that identifies it as blue, red, green, yellow, and so
forth. Hues are classified as either warm or cool. The warm
hues are red, orange, and yellow; and the cool hues are purple,
blue, and green. Brown is a warm hue, as it results from a
combination of more warm colors than cool ones. Adults and
older children tend to prefer cool colors to warm ones, whereas
younger children are attracted to high contrast, regardless of
whether the colors are warm or cool (Winner, 1982, p. 114).

Even though color distinctions are determined through the way
light refracts off a surface, there are differences in the ability to
perceive color based on cultural variation. For instance, some
cultures do not have words that distinguish red from orange, and
therefore members of that culture do not perceive a difference
in those two hues (Berlin and Kay, 1969; Davis, 2000). On the
other hand, some cultures have multiple words for white, based
on the quality of light through snow, which makes their
perception of white more subtle than people who don't live in
that culture. Hues also take on different meaning in different
cultures. In the United States, for instance, it is typical to wear
black as a sign of mourning. In India, white clothing signals
that someone is in mourning.
In picturebooks, hues often appeal to the traditional meanings
of that color in the culture represented. For instance, in Brian
Collier's illustration of a young African American girl situated
against a red, white, and blue American flag in Doreen
Rappaport's Martin's Big Words (2001), he also incorporates the
black, green, and orange hues found in the flags of many
African nations. This collage of colors creates a visual
metaphor of African American identity and is reinforced by the
words that accompany the picture: "Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
cared about all Americans. He cared about people all over the
world. And people all over the world admired him" (n.p.).
In Western culture, brown often signifies earthiness, solidity,
and dependability. Rich browns dominate the illustrations in
Phoebe Gilman's Something From Nothing (1992), where the
boy's home and his grandfather are his dependable anchors as he
is going through change. Red, on the other hand, being the color
of blood and fire, signals danger, excitement, and warmth
(Bang, 2000; Nodelman, 1988) and is more likely to be found in
books that feature those elements, as in Eve Bunting's Smoky
Night (1994).

Tone or Shade
The tone or shade of a color is created when the color is mixed
with black or white. Mixing red with black, for instance, creates
burgundy or dark red, while mixing it with white gives it a pink
tone. Tones are often used to create mood in a picturebook:
Darker shades can make a picture seem scarier, while brighter
tones lighten the mood. This association works largely because
humans see better in bright light, so we are more confident in
well-lighted environments. We associate the dark with fear and
mystery because it disables the sense most of us depend on to
maintain an awareness of our surroundings (Bang, 2000).
Again, take a look at Eve Bunting's Smoky Night (1994), where
the dominant shades are dark to complement the theme of fear
during the Los Angeles riots. Compare Smoky Night with any
book by Kevin Henkes, who almost always works in light tones
for his light-hearted tales of elementary-school-aged mice with
typical, easily solved problems. Henkes's books include
Chester's Way (1988), Owen (1993), Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse
(1996), and Wemberly Worried (2000).
Saturation
Saturation refers to the degree to which the color is pure—that
is, a color is said to be fully saturated when it hasn't been mixed
with either white or black. Look around the space where you are
right now. Most of the colors you see will likely be toned
down—that is, mixed with white or black to lighten or darken
the purity of their hue. We rarely use fully saturated colors for
interior design elements, and thus the objects whose colors are
fully saturated stand out and capture our attention.
As we noted in Chapter 1, children under the age of 9 almost
invariably prefer fully saturated colors (Winner, 1982). This
age-related color preference is something to pay attention to
when choosing appealing literature for children. What adults
find garish and overly bright may appeal very much to young
children, while children are likely to be unimpressed by subtle
shifts of muted color that adults find beautiful.

Children also learn to associate colors with emotions (Zentner,
2001). The research in this area is unclear as to exactly why or
how color affects mood, but we use color words to describe our
moods (such as "feeling blue" or "green with envy"), and
children learn to associate certain colors with certain states of
mind or feeling (Boyatzis & Varghese, 1994; Valdez &
Mehrabian, 1994; Zentner, 2001). In addition to emotional
connections with color, color also becomes tied to gender
norms. Some of this is completely subjective—that is, we make
associations with color along the lines of positive memories or
personal preferences—while other connections are more
culturally determined.
An important consideration is the way colors are combined in a
story. Different color combinations evoke different responses.
For very young children, high contrast is important. Children
are looking for basic patterns and shapes, so the less shading,
blending, and gradation of color, the easier it will be for them
to pick out and focus on a particular shape. High contrast can
also contribute to the sense of energy that a picture generates.
Black and white, with occasional dashes of red, are a popular
choice for young children (see Mary Azarian's A Farmer's
Alphabet [1981], Munro Leaf's The Story of Ferdinand [1936],
and Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree [1964]). You can find
other high-contrast combinations by looking at the color wheel.
The highest contrasts are colors directly across from each other:
from blue, for instance, to orange, or from yellow to purple.
These high-contrast combinations are often used in sports team
uniforms; they generate a sense of action, energy, and
excitement.
Eric Carle's books are notable for their use of rich, fully
saturated and highly contrasting colors. He employs a collage
technique that consists of tissue papers that he paints himself.
His figures contrast sharply with their backgrounds. If his

figures are colorful, as they are in The Very Hungry Caterpillar
(1969), he sets them against a white background. If his figures
are white or light colored, he uses a dark background. This
seemingly simple technique is not only pleasing to the eye but it
helps very young children isolate and focus on the important
elements of the story. For a quick slide show that demonstrates
Carle's technique, click here or here.
Some books, such as Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon
(1947) and Denise Fleming's In a Small, Small Pond (1993),
achieve their greatest contrasts through the turn of the page.
The contrasts in these books contribute to both the uses of the
book and the storytelling. While Goodnight Moon is clearly a
bedtime book, In a Small, Small Pond ends with a good night
message to the pond, so it can also be a good choice for ending
a day. For an extension activity to use with In a Small, Small
Pond, click here.
The succession of page turns in Goodnight Moon moves
between bright, warm hues and gray hues. In a Small, Small
Pond alternates between warm and cool colors with each turn of
the page. These shifts cause young eyes to dilate and constrict,
which makes children blink and, ideally, feel sleepy. The grays
in Goodnight Moon become darker as the story moves along,
gently guiding young children to sleep. In In a Small, Small
Pond, that movement is more subtle, as the frog moves between
underwater environments, which are fully saturated blues and
greens, to above the water scenes, which feature a bright yellow
sky. By the end of the book, the contrasts are less noticeable;
the scenes remain fully saturated, but the colors on the page
contrast less, so that energy of the narrative calms to its good
night message.
How Color Helps Tell the Story
A good illustrator will use color strategically to complement the
story's meaning and help children track the narrative. After all,

if books are strange objects to children, stories are no more
natural. Learning how to follow a character through a story and
figure out relationships between characters is one of the
benefits to early exposure to good literature. This skill helps
young children become better readers throughout their lives.
Good illustrators help scaffold this emerging skill by
connecting characters through color.
Children's book author and illustrator Molly Bang (2000)
describes how an illustrator might connect the wolf and Little
Red Riding Hood by making his eyes the same red as her cloak.
Children track the red of the wolf's eyes to the red of Red's
cloak and immediately sense that she is in danger, especially if
that red is also included in the wolf's mouth.
Similarly, in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are
(1963), as Max approaches the island in his boat, one wild thing
is smaller than the others and has white fur and horns, which
connects him with Max visually, as Max is also wearing a white
costume that features horns. Interestingly, this character
disappears after the second spread of the island and does not
appear in the wild rumpus. This may suggest that he is a
representation of Max himself, as Max replaces him once he
arrives on the island and established himself as their leader.
A more complex example of how color can head off confusion is
found in Gerald McDermott's Raven: A Trickster Tale From the
Pacific Northwest (1993). Here, a magical, brightly colored
raven decides that he will find light for the people, who lived in
perpetual darkness and cold. He travels until he finds the house
of the Sky Chief, which has a source of light. He turns himself
into a pine needle and lands in the water so that the Sky Chief's
daughter will swallow him as she gets herself a drink. This
impregnates the girl, and she gives birth to a child, who is
really Raven. As a child, Raven pretends to play, but he is
continually seeking the source of the light. He finds it in a box
and cries until his mother opens the box to reveal a ball, which

is really the sun. When she gives him the ball to play with, he
transforms back into a Raven and steals the ball, launching it
into the sky for all people to enjoy.
Clearly, this would be a difficult narrative for inexperienced
readers to track, as the main character changes form. Like many
trickster tales, it also has a questionable moral trajectory: Raven
has to steal the ball in order to give it to the people. McDermott
solves both of these problems through the use of color.
Trickster figures feature in many folktale traditions as
characters who get what they want and need through deception
against more physically powerful opponents. Raven is brightly
colored with distinctive markings; his body is marked with
patterns taken from Tlingit culture in red, black, green, and
blue. When he is reborn as a boy, his clothing features the same
colors and markings, which make him stand out from the other
inhabitants of the Sky Chief's house, including his mother, who
all dress in blue, gold, turquoise, and brown. So even though he
has changed form, the colors connect him to his former self and
reassure children that this really is Raven. As for his theft, the
box in which the sun is hidden bears the same colors and
markings as Raven himself, which can indicate to children that
the box and its contents actually belong to Raven in the first
place, so his actions don't really constitute stealing from his
adoptive family. The use of color in this book thus helps
children track a potentially confusing story.
Color is an enormously important aspect of picturebook design.
It affects whether a book will have immediate appeal for
children, establishes its mood, affects its energy, and helps
readers track the narrative flow. However, color also combines
with other, equally important elements, such as shape, line,
texture, figures, and words, to create the overall meaning of a
text.
Shape

Picturebook artists are deeply sensitive to shape when they
design their illustrations. In her book, Picture This: How
Pictures Work (2000), Molly Bang walks readers through an
artist's decision-making process when it comes to creating an
illustration for a picturebook, and then follows up by outlining
certain general principles that affect that decision-making
process.
Bang points out, for instance, that rounded shapes are not as
threatening as pointed or jagged ones. This seems intuitive, as it
reflects our embodied experience; poufy pillows can't hurt us,
while pointy sticks can. Horizontal lines offer stability, whereas
diagonals suggest energy and movement. Vertical lines suggest
power and containment.
These associations are related to the way our bodies work and
are oriented in space. Philosophers George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson (2003) call these kinds of associations conceptual
metaphors. A conceptual metaphor is a way of understanding
one idea or concept in terms of another. For instance, human
beings walk upright, so we associate being vertical with higher
or happier status. We often understand and talk about our
emotional moods in these terms: When we are sad, we are
"down," but when we are happy, things are looking "up."
Additionally, we might consider a mean-spirited action as "low-
down" while moral actions are "upright" or "high-minded."
This kind of thinking relates to gestural and spatial literacies in
picturebooks. We are never more stable than when we are
horizontal, but we find it difficult to move in that position, so
characters and shapes that are horizontal, or wider than they are
tall, seem stable and comforting to us. On the other hand, we
can't maintain a diagonal position for very long without moving,
so characters or figures placed at an angle seem unstable and in
motion. Taller people usually have power over smaller ones,
and those wretched vertical bars around a baby's crib separate
the baby from the comfort of other people, so taller figures are

more likely to be threatening. Just as brighter pictures signify
happiness because we see better in the light, so the vertical
orientation of our bodies leads us to think that higher is better
or more powerful in terms of a direction of movement.
The Meanings of Shapes
These associations with shape translate to picturebook design in
several ways, as Bang (2000, pp. 42–50) points out. Here are
some examples of how shapes can make us feel:
A triangle on its base is stable, but a triangle balanced on the
tip of one of its angles is always in danger of falling over, so it
makes us anxious. We see an unfinished movement in a triangle
on its tip, and we long to complete it.
A steady horizon can suggest comfort and stability in an
anxious situation.
Circles accomplish much the same effect, because they
represent a comforting enclosure, a sense of completeness with
no sharp edges or menacing corners.
Vertical shapes may make us feel secure, but they may also
make us feel confined and powerless, unless we are the ones in
control of them.
Tomie DePaola makes use of the principle of horizontal
stability in Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs (1973). Four-
year-old Tommy has a grandmother and a great-grandmother
that he loves very much and likes to visit. One day, his
grandmother tells him that his great-grandmother is no longer
with them, and Tommy must come to terms with losing someone
he loves. This is surely a traumatic experience that many
children go through and that has the potential to throw them off
balance. DePaola's illustrations have a comforting stability that
is created by the firm horizontal line through the center of each
illustration. In one illustration, for instance, the horizontal line
is the window seat that Tommy sits on; in another, it is the
stove where his grandmother cooks; and in yet another, it is his
great-grandmother's dresser or the rails of her bed. This subtle

feature helps the reader feel secure in the midst of an insecure
situation.
Cynthia Rylant's Dog Heaven (1995) also uses shapes quite
effectively, though very differently, in her depiction of the
afterlife for dogs. Happily remembering a dog who has passed
away requires a different kind of imagining than remembering a
great-grandmother. Dogs are at their happiest when they are
moving, so Rylant uses strong diagonals in most of her pictures,
with most of the diagonals moving upward from left to right. As
we noted, movement from left to right in Western culture
signifies progress and forward movement. Likewise, moving
upward is also a signifier that things are getting better.
Rylant puts together a combination of elements to create the
effect she wants to achieve. She uses dark colors to
acknowledge that the passing of a dog from this world to the
next is a sad event. But she creates a heaven for dogs where
they are constantly and happily in motion in a mostly upward
direction, and then uses the soft, fluffy shapes of clouds to
make beds for them to rest in. The overall effect is one of
happiness through tears, and Rylant achieves it through the
combination of conventional uses of color, movement, and
shape.
Line
Like color and shape, lines can affect the mood of illustrations.
Outlines can enclose and contain shapes and can also be used to
express movement. Borders or white space can surround the
entire illustration on a page.
Outlines
The decision to use outlines or not, and what kind of outlines,
produces very different feelings in the artwork. With the
exception of the angels' wings, Rylant doesn't outline her

figures in Dog Heaven. Instead, they are distinguished from
their backgrounds by color. This lack of an artificial separation
between the subject and its surrounding has the effect of
suggesting a natural or organic relationship between the two.
DePaola outlines everything in Nana Upstairs & Nana
Downstairs, using a slightly darker color of the thing he is
outlining. Like the horizon line, this heightens the effect of
stability and calm; Tommy lives in an ordered world where
things are contained in their proper places.
In Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really
Angry (1999), she uses brightly contrasting outlines to
emphasize the energetic, unstable mood of the scene, especially
the object of the conflict—in this case, the toy gorilla—and the
explosiveness of her words.
Mo Willems' outlines of Pigeon look as though they have been
done in crayon, which adds to the childlike perspective that is
so important in those books, whereas Beatrix Potter's delicate
black-ink outlines draw attention to the enclosed coziness of her
books.
One can see updated echoes of Potter's style in some of Kevin
Henkes's books, such as Owen (1993) and others whose covers
appear earlier in this chapter. Like Potter, Henkes uses thin
black ink outlines to separate his watercolor figures and objects
from their background, giving a sense of smallness while
picking out tiny details.
By contrast, David Diaz makes use of thick black outlines,
paying homage to the award-winning style of John Steptoe, who
was one of the first African American writers and illustrators to
highlight the experiences of urban children. The John Steptoe
New Talent Award is given by the American Library
Association under the auspices of the Coretta Scott King Award
committee to honor writers and illustrators of color who have
published fewer than three books. Like Steptoe, Diaz creates a
much bolder look that emphasizes the solidity of the characters

and suggests moods of fear and anger but also that the
characters are self-contained and united in the midst of an
unstable situation.
Page Borders
An important role that line plays in picturebooks is the
enclosing of pictures in borders. The idea that the world is
bounded and enclosed is a very comforting one for children.
They prefer small spaces and are sometimes threatened by
openings or unbounded spaces. In general, shaky, unfinished
lines evoke a feeling of energy or instability, while smooth,
controlled lines suggest stability and control.
Ann Jonas's Holes and Peeks (1984) demonstrates the
comforting function of borders. "I don't like holes," her
unnamed child narrator says. "They scare me." The pictures
accompanying these words feature such small annoyances as
holes in footie pajamas and stuffed animals, as well as more
frightening holes such as the drain hole in the bathtub and that
biggest, scariest hole of all—the toilet. Peeks, on the other
hand, are not like holes. When the child can control the visual
field by peeking through a hole he has made by almost covering
his head with a towel, or peering through a rolled-up
newspaper, the world is more manageable. Bordered pictures
offer such "peeks": they are small, bounded worlds that a child
can focus on. In fact, the technique of using borders may
actually help teach young readers how to focus on a scene.
Illustrators can also use borders to suggest a sense of who has
imaginative control. For instance, with each page turn of Where
the Wild Things Are, the pictures become larger and the white
space around them becomes smaller. This progression suggests
the growing importance of Max's imagination as he reacts to his
mother's scolding. The white space around the pictures could be
said to represent the influence of Max's mother, her authority
over him. As he gets progressively naughtier, her control of the

situation lessens, until finally she sends him to his room. Here,
his imagination grows larger as his mother's voice has been shut
out by the closed door. Finally, there are no borders around the
pictures at all, and no words, as he gives in to the wild rumpus
of his turbulent emotions. When he is exhausted and lonely and
ready to submit to his mother's discipline, the borders return.
Lines That Show Movement
Like shapes, lines also help us make the imaginative leap
between still pictures and movement. Comics artists are most
well-known for the use of lines to indicate movement, but
picturebook artists often use them as well; they draw curved
lines around a character's feet to show that the feet are in
motion, or wiggly lines around a character to indicate shaking
or dancing. These are sometimes referred to as motion lines.
Wavy lines around a character's head to show that the character
is dizzy, shocked, surprised, or even angry are referred to as
emanata. Mo Willems makes extensive use of both motion lines
and emanata in his Pigeon books as well as his Elephant and
Piggie series.
Texture and Tactile Appeal
Texture is another important feature of picturebook art, both in
terms of its representation and in terms of the physical book
itself. Because for very young children, picturebooks are
objects in the world just like any other object, texture matters.
Children are very touch oriented, so the feel of a book is
important. You might remember the classic Pat the Bunny
(Kunhardt, 2001) from your own childhood; initially published
in 1940, it now has DVD versions and apps, which keeps the
spirit of interactive book play while addressing it in different
ways—after all, Daddy's scratchy beard doesn't feel like a touch
screen! Also, there is a brief video showing a child interacting
with this book on the Amazon page.
However, there are any number of touch and feel books

available now, as well as lift-the-flap and other books with
simple mechanisms for children to manipulate. The key to
selecting these sorts of books for toddlers is to make sure they
can tolerate rough handling. Tabs and flaps should be sturdy
enough to bear repeated attempts to pull, lift, and return them to
their starting positions.
Pop-Up Books
More elaborate pop-up books are obviously best reserved for
older children with more developed fine-motor skills. For
example, the paper artistry of Robert Sabuda is awe-inspiring in
his versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (2003) and
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2000), as well as in his seasonal
books and fantasy encyclopedias. Other paper artists, such as
Joan Irvine (How to Make Super Pop-Ups, 2008), Ruth
Wickings (Pop-Up: Everything You Need to Know to Create
Your Own Pop-Up Book, 2010), David Carter and James Diaz
(Let's Make It Pop-Up, 2004), have books that teach the art of
making pop-up books to children, so that they can add these
design elements to their own stories.
Visual Textures
In addition to how a book feels in one's hands, we should
consider how texture is represented in picturebooks:
Brushstrokes are evident when a picturebook artist has used oils
or gouache (opaque watercolor) to create the original art. This
gives a book a weighty, serious feel, as it implies the thickness
of its paint.
Watercolors tend to create a lighter, more transparent feeling.
Sometimes the texture of the paper is visible, making the
picture itself seem invitingly soft and nubbly.
More and more contemporary picturebook artists are turning to
collage and computer-assisted art, both of which offer a great
range of possibilities for depicting texture.
The texture of depicted surfaces engages the desire to touch,
even when we know that the page we touch is likely to be

smooth. This imaginative transaction can actually move us to
run our fingers over the surface of the picture, as the depicted
textures can evoke memories or stir curiosity. Or we might be
inspired to look more closely at a picture, or linger over details
in a collage.
The backgrounds in David Diaz's illustrations of Eve Bunting's
Smoky Night (1994), for instance, feature photographs of
collages constructed of spilled cereal, plastic bags, matches,
bubble wrap, and bits of torn and cut paper of various weights,
colors, and textures. These images powerfully evoke the chaos
and mess that resulted from the riots in Los Angeles, California,
in 1992 following the Rodney King trial, grounding the book
with a sense of immediacy. Because we can imagine what these
physical things feel like, we are drawn into imagining what the
entire night must have felt like for the boy and his mother. The
textures also inspire analysis: Because the materials with which
the picture is made are recognizable and familiar, we ask how
and why the artist made the choices that he did—why these
materials, why this combination? How was this put together?
These questions take us deeper into the meaning of the story.
Icons, Cartoons, and Animal Characters
In some books, the illustrations are simple line drawings with
flat colors that only minimally depict what they represent.
These sorts of images are called icons, and they are used in
everything from political discourse to advertising to scientific
communication to children's books. Icons are simplified images
or representations of objects, ideas, philosophies, emotions, or
entities. For instance, a picture of a flag is an icon for the
country it stands for. A circle with a vertical line running
through it and two diagonal lines coming out from the vertical
one is recognized as a peace sign. A heart stands for love.
Despite their simplicity and distance from the object they
depict, children (and adults) still find these images absorbing,
and have no trouble relating them to their real-life counterparts.
This is because we tend to think conceptually. We pick out a

few distinctive features of an item as definitional, and as long
as the item has those features, we accept it as a depiction of that
thing.
Did you have any difficulty identifying the first one as a cat and
the second one as a pig? If you think about it, these figures look
nothing like a cat or a pig. They are composed of black lines in
simple shapes, and there are relatively few differences between
the two. Those differences, however, are crucial in terms of
conceptual understanding. Both pigs and cats have eyes,
mouths, and pointy ears, sort of, but only cats have whiskers,
and only pigs have snouts.
Clearly, resemblance to a real object is less important than
having a conceptual understanding of what that object is. This
gives picturebook artists incredible freedom to craft characters.
As long as they give him a long, hairy snout, broad shoulders,
and large, pointy ears, illustrators can make a wolf walk on all
fours or on two legs, wear clothes or not, or even wear glasses
and a stylish hat, and readers will still identify the character as
a wolf. Picture him orange, however, and you may have a fox
instead.
When an illustrator uses a nonhuman character, however, it is
often to represent simplified human characteristics. The
nonhuman characters become icons for human emotions, traits,
and character types. This enables readers to identify with them
by virtue of their position in a relationship (are they mommies,
daddies, neighbors, villains, etc.?) or even body type (short,
tall, thin, chubby, etc.). This can broaden the appeal of a picture
book by making the characters seem more universal and less
bound by a specific culture. Class and gender markers can still
be present, though, and sometimes subtle ethnicity markers do
come into play. Curious George, for instance, is from Africa,
while all of the human characters in his story are White New
Yorkers. Ferdinand is a Spanish bull. Mother animals still, in
the 21st century, are often portrayed indoors only, wearing

aprons.
It is important to try, as much as possible, to avoid these
stereotypical images or to make sure that the range of texts that
you share with children is diverse enough for them to see that
this is just one sort of depiction among many. But while animal
characters do not completely erase identity markers, they do
tend to blur them so as to widen the opportunities for children
from diverse backgrounds to identify with them as characters.
However, using nonhuman characters is, almost paradoxically,
also a distancing mechanism—it enables us to explore actions
and consequences that might be disturbing if the text featured a
human character. Reading about the exploits of a small boy
rabbit who disobeys his mother or a monkey who gets in trouble
because he's too curious is somehow more palatable than
reading about an actual human child who almost gets killed by
an angry farmer or from falling off a boat.
Perhaps we need to go back to Dissanayake's explanations of
infant preferences for a fuller understanding of how icons work
(see Chapter 1). You'll recall that she lists simplification,
repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration as features that
characterize the interactions that infants prefer. Comics artist
Scott McCloud (1993) argues that simplification enables the
amplification of certain features—that is, by weeding out extra
detail in a cartoon figure, an artist can emphasize, or
exaggerate, the key features. But more importantly, perhaps,
animal characters enable artists to exaggerate the consequences
of an action.
When my students and I discussed the response to Curious
George's accidental emergency phone call, they were struck by
the difference between what happened to Curious George and
what happens to children in real life. Most children who have
access to a phone, they argued, have dialed 9-1-1 at one point or

another. Because this is a common occurrence, the dispatchers
are trained to know how to handle it, and they don't make a big
deal out of it. In other words, there are no natural negative
consequences for children who do this. But it is still a behavior
that we want to discourage, for obvious reasons. Thus, a story
like Curious George, where Curious George has to go to jail for
accidentally calling the fire department, makes the point
through exaggeration that it's a bad idea.
Of course, simplification and exaggeration are not limited to
animal characters in picturebooks. The practice of cartooning
distances even human characters enough so that they can get
involved in humorously exaggerated situations. Simms Taback's
There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (1997)
demonstrates this nicely, as both the old lady and the animals
she eats are cartooned enough to allow readers to distance
themselves from her predicament rather than empathize with it.
The wonder of cartoon illustrations is that they can produce
either a humorous or a frightening effect, depending on how the
author manipulates the figures. Grossly exaggerated or distorted
figures tend to evoke humor, because they are incongruous with
what readers know to be true or possible about the world. But
they can also be creepy or frightening if their body shapes seem
painful or overbearing.
On the other hand, more realistic figures who behave in ways
that either match their own species or successfully imitate
human gestures and postures invite empathy. Empathy is the
ability to feel what another person, or even a cartoon character
in a book, is feeling. Figure drawings, like textures, should
evoke at least an imaginative kinetic response—that is, readers
should be able to feel their bodies in that posture and
extrapolate from that feeling how the character must be feeling
emotionally. This is part of gestural literacy—the ability to read
an emotion based on a body posture or expression. Drooping
shoulders, down-turned mouths, and large eyes evoke feelings

of sadness, while upraised arms, big smiles, and wide-legged
stances generate feelings of triumph and elation. Stiffly drawn
characters with neutral expressions evoke, well, nothing, and
can be hard for children to interpret.
Point of View
In order for readers to identify with a character within the story,
artists must decide how the characters and objects are going to
be positioned, and they must give the reader a specific place
from which to view the scenes. This relates to the development
of spatial literacy. Ann Jonas, for instance, maintains the
toddler's perspective throughout Holes and Peeks. While adults
come and go in the pictures, readers never see their upper
bodies or faces. Instead, we see the bottoms of towels, the lower
windowsill, the lower half of the shower, the pipes that go
under the sink. The toilet and bathtub are just below eye level.
By adopting and maintaining a point of view that is at eye level
for the child, there is an implicit acknowledgement that the
child's fears and perspectives about holes and peeks are valid
and important.
Point of view can also be manipulated for storytelling purposes.
On the cover of Nan Gregory's How Smudge Came (1995), we
are invited to see from Smudge the puppy's perspective as a
hand reaches down from above to pet him. This perspective also
hides the owner of that hand, who turns out to be a young
woman, Cindy, with Down syndrome who lives in a group
home. The fact that Cindy has Down syndrome is not revealed
until after she has rescued Smudge from a rainy night outdoors
and carried him home—that is, we learn of her smart thinking,
compassion, and heroism before we learn of her disability.
Immediately after we see Cindy's face and recognize the
features of Down syndrome, the perspective shifts so that the
viewer is looking down on Cindy from above as she sits on the
floor to feed Smudge. This shift in stance indicates that Cindy

is in for a bit of trouble—the viewer is watching from the
position of higher authority and surveillance, and Cindy is
lower than the viewer, which is the way Cindy is positioned in
her group home and elsewhere in her life.
In the spreads where we are looking head-on at Cindy—that is,
seeing her from her own height and point of view, she is either
happily doing her chores in the group home, cuddled up in bed,
or playing with Smudge, or talking to the residents of the
hospice where she works. We also get that perspective when she
is despondent after having lost Smudge and is trying to find a
way to get him back.
When she is in trouble, though, for keeping a puppy without
permission, the viewer is once more placed high above her,
looking down on her as she is being scolded. In one picture, the
viewer is positioned as the authority figure; the angle is from
the bottom of the steps with pointing finger emerging from the
lower edge of the picture, presumably where the reader would
be, banishing Cindy to her room at the top of the stairs.
When Smudge is taken away from her, we are shown a full
frontal picture of half of Cindy's face as a tear falls from her
eye. This picture conveys the meaning of how torn in half she
feels at the loss of her pet, but it is also confrontational, as
readers are forced to face her on an equal level and
acknowledge her deep sadness, an emotion that people don't
conventionally associate with people who have Down syndrome.
The shifting of sight lines from Smudge's perspective, to
Cindy's, to an external position of authority over her, forces
readers to think about what their stance would be in this
situation. It would be easy to say that we would be on Cindy's
and Smudge's side, but neurotypical people are not in the habit
of respecting the wishes of people with developmental
disabilities, who are rarely allowed the same freedoms to make
decisions as neurotypical people are. By alternating our visual

perspective, the illustrator Ron Lightburn makes us confront the
fact that there is a hierarchy in the way we treat people and that
we are complicit in the oppression of certain groups of people,
whose feelings and desires are just as deep and powerful as our
own.
Composition
The way the viewer is positioned is just one of the elements that
affects the overall composition of a picture. Composition is the
way that elements of a picture are arranged to relate to one
another.
Do they overlap, for instance? How does this closeness make
readers feel? The reader might experience a kind of tension if
the characters seem to be "in each other's faces." Other
overlaps, such as readers find in Smoky Night, Time for Bed, or
Stellaluna indicate physical closeness and intimacy between
parents and their children.
Does the positioning of the figures or objects in a drawing
suggest a larger overall shape, such as a triangle or circle? In
Owen, the main character is confronted with the problem of
having to give up his beloved blanket. The near final scene
features his mother cutting his blanket into handkerchiefs, but
the composition suggests that the destruction of his blanket is a
victory for Owen, as the handkerchiefs fall in a complete circle
that includes his mother, his father, and himself as part of its
structure, symbolizing that he is still whole and complete, even
if his blanket is not. Henkes even stresses this symbolism in his
composition by including a dotted line to trace the circle.
Some compositions are very clean, with only a single central
image on a white background, as in most of Beatrix Potter's
texts. This keeps the focus clearly on the main character and his
adventures. Other compositions are busier, inviting readers to
consider multiple details and activities that are taking place

simultaneously, such as the scenes from Something From
Nothing. While the compositions are busy, they don't seem
cluttered or chaotic because of the use of borders separating the
elements of the pictures: the various rooms of the house; the
inside of the house from the outside; the pictures from the text;
and finally, the top of the house from the mouse's level below.
Different things are going on in each section, but the clear
demarcations ensure that readers aren't overwhelmed by
busyness.
Other pictorial compositions show a single character going
through a series of activities that take place over time. For
instance, when Curious George enters the house of the man in
the yellow hat, he eats dinner, smokes a pipe, and changes into
pajamas on the same page. This page is laid out vertically, with
the first small scene oriented top right, the second scene
oriented in the middle on the left, and the third scene oriented
on the right again at the bottom. The scenes are separated by
white space, which helps readers imagine the time lapse. This
type of layout indicates continuity in the flow of time; these
things happened on the same evening, one right after the other.
Having each scene on a separate page might indicate that more
time had passed, which might confuse the reader about the time
span of the story.
Strong composition not only conveys story information within
each individual spread but it also contributes to the flow of the
book. A single page may suggest unfinished action through the
use of diagonals or a figure about to leave the picture. The next
picture then should somehow be related to the one preceding it.
Reader response theorists (Chatman, 1980; Iser, 1978;
Rosenblatt, 1978) point out that there is always a system of
gaps in a narrative that readers must fill in—time lapses or
incomplete information that readers cover over with their own
experience of how things work. A book that portrayed every
detail of every minute of a character's life would be a tedious
book indeed. But the gaps must be skillfully constructed so that

readers don't have to make too many guesses about what
happened between one scene and the next. This is particularly
true in picturebooks. Characters cannot change clothes,
hairstyles, or body shapes between pictures without a clear
explanation. Dramatic changes in scenery must be accounted
for. A sense of continuity must be maintained with each page
turn in order for the narrative to flow properly, but there also
must be enough variety to make each picture interesting on its
own terms. And the final pages must bring the pictorial
narrative to some sort of closure.
Finally, it is important to consider the composition of the cover
of the book. You should be able to judge, for instance, who the
main character or characters are. You should also be able to tell
something about the seriousness of the book—whether you are
in for a humorous book or one that has a more somber or
subdued tone. You might also get some sense of the setting.
Guidelines for Identifying Elements in Effective Picturebook De
sign
Color
· Babies and toddlers prefer high-contrast colors.
· Until age 9, children prefer fully saturated colors.
· Colors can help readers track narrative flow.
· Colors can help readers focus attention on important details.
· Colors can connect characters.
· Colors can create mood.
· Colors can have different meanings in different cultures.
Shape, Line, and Texture
·
Shapes and lines, including outlines, can support the overall me
aning and mood of the story.
· Lines can help readers understand movement.
· Borders can be used to create specific effects.
·
Textures and tactile appeal can invite interaction and close view
ing.

Characters and Icons
· Characters should have natural-
looking gestures and postures that suggest fluid movement, unle
ss these are beingmanipulated for humorous or thematic effect.
·
Animal characters should have enough conceptual features to be
recognizable as their species, even if they are behaving inhuma
n ways.
· Characters should not be pictured in stereotypical roles.
Composition and Point of View
·
The viewer's perspective created by the artwork can assist in un
derstanding the story and its themes.
·
Compositions should be arranged so that readers can follow the
time sequence.
·
Compositions can be highly detailed, but not cluttered and chaot
ic, unless chaos is a thematic element of the story.
· Pictures should imply continuity between page turns.
·
Overall compositions can attend to the shapes that best fit the th
eme of the story.
· Cover art should set appropriate expectations for the book.
3.3 But What About the Words?
So far we have focused mainly on the images of picturebooks,
but what about the words? In the next chapter, we will focus on
the stories these words tell and the kinds of characters they
create, but it is important to think about the words of a
picturebook specifically as they relate to the visual images.
The same principles that we have been focusing on with regard
to the visual aspect of children's books apply to the words:
Children like novelty, simplification, repetition, exaggeration,

and elaboration in the stories that they hear. Now, obviously,
there are some possible contradictions here. Repetition, for
instance, competes with novelty, and simplification competes
with elaboration. The answer, then, is to make sure you are
attending to a balance of these things as you choose the books
and stories you will share with children.
Wordless Picturebooks
Of course, some books have few or no words at all. Many
concept books for babies have pictures of everyday things
organized according to a theme but without a story to connect
them. Ironically, wordless books that do tell stories often take
longer to read than books with words. Since the story is told
entirely visually, it calls for patient attention to small details.
However, some wordless books are fairly simple for very young
children to follow. For instance, Alexandra Day's series of
mostly wordless books about a Rottweiler named Carl features
simple predicaments that arise when the mother leaves Carl in
charge of the baby. They get into humorous scrapes, but the
heroic Carl always manages to keep the baby safe from harm.
Eric Rohmann's My Friend Rabbit (2002) and Jerry Pinkney's
The Lion and the Mouse (2009) both won Caldecott Awards and
work well with very young children. Adults and children can
work together to decide what's happening in these stories, an
activity that can stimulate turn-taking and discussion as well as
develop visual literacy.
Many wordless books are pitched to older readers as well. They
require readers to speculate about cause and effect, attend to
multiple visual narratives, and infer plot movement from visual
clues. For instance, David Wiesner's books Flotsam (2006) and
Tuesday (1997) take careful viewers on extraordinary flights of
imagination through time and space. Bill Thomson's Chalk
(2010) follows the adventures of three multicultural children
who discover a bag of magic chalk. Like Harold with his purple

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT PART ONE SHOULD LOOK LIKEPart 1.docx

THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT PART ONE SHOULD LOOK LIKEPart 1.docx

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