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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 Design

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 meaning 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 viewing.

Characters and Icons

· Characters should have natural-looking gestures and postures that suggest fluid movement, unless 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 inhuman 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 understanding 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 chaotic, 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 theme 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 crayon, the boys discover that what they draw becomes real. If you are unfamiliar with this classic text, you may see and hear it read here.

Wordless picturebooks are useful resources for teaching visual, gestural, and spatial literacies. As readers translate the pictures into words that tell the stories, they exercise their creativity, develop their vocabulary and visual acuity, and learn about story sequencing. When they read wordless picturebooks in groups or with an adult, they also develop skills in logic and reasoning as they defend their interpretation of the pictures, which may differ from their classmates' views.

Reading Aloud

When books do have words, picturebook authors often provide visual clues for reading aloud. We can almost think of them as stage directions:

Large fonts mean to read something loudly,

smaller fonts mean to quiet down, and

shaky fonts may mean to make your voice quiver with fear.

Ellipses (the three dots that follow an unfinished sentence) before a page turn indicate that you should stretch out a syllable as you turn the page so that you carry over the anticipation to the next page, where the sentence should finish.

Most of us have enough visual and cultural knowledge to attend to these clues almost instinctively, but it is ALWAYS a good idea to practice a read-aloud before you share it, just in case there are moments when the text stumbles or when you encounter a place where you are uncertain about what the reading requires in terms of performance. In the practice of reading aloud, take your cue from children's television and the principle of exaggeration. Gestures, voice modulation, accents, and eye movement all benefit from being bigger than they would be in normal conversation. For inspiration on developing your read-aloud technique, listen to a few stories read by professional actors: http://www.storylineonline.net/.

Learning New Words

When you choose a book to read aloud, remember that children have greater receptive language than expressive language. In fact, adults do as well. Receptive language refers to the words and expressions we understand when we hear them, while expressive language refers to the words we use on a daily basis. Thus we can read and even understand more words than we typically use, especially if those words are given an appropriate context. In traditional literacy studies, context clues are the other words surrounding the unfamiliar word that enable us to make a good guess about what the unfamiliar word might mean.

A multiliteracies approach widens the range of possible context clues for developing readers. Pictures can help, but so can our gestures and the way we say a word. One of my favorite words, for instance, is "twitterpated," which is a word the owl in Disney's Bambi uses to describe the springtime mating behavior of the animals in the forest. Bambi, Thumper, and Flower (and the young viewers of the film, presumably) don't understand the word, so the owl launches into a very thorough explanation, using not only words but his whole body to explain the feeling. Watch the scene from Bambi for a lovely example of how to elaborate on unfamiliar vocabulary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qq-dGMVOzc.

Another example of multimodal context clues can be found in Leo Lionni's Swimmy (1973), where Swimmy is described as being "as black as a mussel shell." New readers may not have come across the word mussel before, though they may know its homophone muscle, which sounds the same, but this is clearly not that. There is no picture of a mussel shell on the page. There is a picture of Swimmy, though, and he's quite black. The entire picture of which he is a part is underwater, so readers putting all those things together, along with the word shell, which they will likely know, will figure out that a mussel is a sea creature with a black shell. The context clues work kind of backwards when you think about it, because you don't need the simile to understand what color Swimmy is, but seeing what color Swimmy is gives you the context to learn the new word, mussel.

While new words are often quite delicious for children to hear and learn to read, sentence structure should be fairly simple. Complex sentences with multiple levels of cause and effect can be confusing for young children. But strings of simple sentences can sound robotic and uninteresting. As you practice reading a book aloud, pay attention to how it sounds. Does it have a natural flow, with a good mix of familiar and novel words and sentence patterns? Will the pictures carry across the room so that children can see the visual cues that will help them understand new words?

Another aspect to pay attention to is the pace of the picturebook. Too many words on a page can cause a young child's attention to wander, particularly if the picture isn't interesting or detailed enough to focus on as you read the words. Unfortunately, this is more of an art than a science, so you will need to let the children you share with teach you what they will tolerate in terms of a picture-to-word ratio. Consider the following characteristics of effective language use in picturebooks:

The book can be read aloud in a natural rhythm, without stumbling or awkwardness.

The book introduces new words with multiple context clues.

The book uses some repetition and some novelty.

The fonts and punctuation marks provide cues for effective performance of the book as a read-aloud.

Sentence structure is varied, but simple.

3.4 Putting It All Together: Word and Picture Interaction

Now let's look at the way the words and pictures work together to convey a story. Various picturebook theorists have come up with various terms for describing the interaction between the words and the pictures, such as limiting (Nodelman, 1988); interanimating (Meek, 1992); polystemic, which refers to "the piecing together of text out of different kinds of signifying systems" (Lewis, 1996, p. 105); or synergistic (Sipe, 1998). For our purposes, we will talk about the interaction as multimodal—the final and most important of the multiliteracies identified by the New London Group (1996).

The advantage to the term multimodal is that it includes the audio aspect—how the words sound out loud—as well as the ways in which readers interact with the book in gestural and spatial terms, which can change its meaning. For instance, books shared with a parent or caregiver in a quiet, cuddly moment assume different meanings than books read in school. They are even read differently; a parent, for instance, might be more likely than the teacher to linger over a picture that interests a child and engage in conversation between reading the lines written. The parent may elaborate or simplify the text or the pictures. School reading, on the other hand, tends to be goal-oriented, with children focusing on the task of progressing through the book, reading the words exactly as they are written, and using the pictures as context clues.

Well-executed picturebooks strike a balance between words and pictures that facilitates maximum interaction and expresses their message through the various modes available to them. For instance, in Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, Mo Willems uses a simple method of direct address to invite readers to interact with the character in the book. He uses thought bubbles to indicate the pigeon's unspoken desires and then has the pigeon look at and speak directly to the reader.

The pigeon is a very simple, iconic figure drawing, but his postures are articulate—they mirror human postures and gestures enough so that children can imagine what the pigeon is feeling through his body language. For instance, when he first asks if he can drive the bus, he bends down, folds his wings, and looks up at the reader as he says, "Please?" The shape of the indicator line for the speech bubble is wavy, so a reader will know to say "Please" in that wavering, sing-songy voice that people use when they are pleading for something that might not be granted.

The pigeon is by turns conspiratorial, disgruntled, dejected, stubborn, humble, exasperated, and finally, explosively angry as he indulges in a full-on tantrum, literally beside himself with frustration. Readers have likely experienced all of these emotions, and they have shown them through their bodies in gestures and postures very similar to the pigeon. Likewise, they have probably used all of his various arguments to try to wheedle their way into getting something they want. In this book, the words and the pictures act in cooperation with each other to create a powerful whole.

Sometimes, however, the pictures and the words in a book seem to contradict each other, and in those cases, readers need to sort out what the relationship is and how it contributes to the overall meaning of the book. For instance, in The Cat in the Hat, the pictures suggest chaos, and the words describe that chaos in a fairly straightforward way. The rhyme and rhythm of the words, however, suggest something completely different—the sound of the words remains completely orderly and under control. This orderliness may help to contain the anxiety some readers experience in reading a story about strange-looking creatures coming in and messing up the house when the parents aren't home. The fact that the poetry never gets out of control, even if the action it narrates seems to, helps readers feel as though the story never gets out of control either.

Another way that pictures and words might seem to contradict each other is through irony. Irony can happen when the words mean something more or different than what they say, as evidenced by the pictures. For instance, in Pat Hutchins's Rosie's Walk (1971), for instance, Rosie the hen takes a walk around the barnyard. The text never indicates that anything else is going on other than Rosie's walk, and Rosie herself remains oblivious to the fact that she is being stalked by a fox, who is thwarted every time he tries to attack her. This is an example of dramatic irony, which happens when the reader knows something more and different about the situation than the character.

The best picturebooks leave some room for reader interpretation. They do this by establishing a particular kind of rhythm between pictures and words, where each provides enough information for readers to move forward while leaving some space for readers to puzzle over the gaps. Consider the following elements related to multimodal quality:

The words and pictures establish a rhythm that facilitates movement through the book.

Ironic relationships between words and pictures contribute to the meaning of the story.

When words are included that describe gestures or emotions, the pictures should match the words.

Some gaps are left for the readers to interpret but not so many or so large that the reader is confused.

Coats, K. (2013).  Children’s literature & the developing reader  [Electronic version]. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.edu/\