How to know when a book is superb: pictures edition, part 2

At long last, a continuation in my children's book series. To recap: this series is divided into five parts consisting of 6 posts.

Part One talked about strategies for using your local library to find quality children's books.
Part Two (A) discussed several design fundamentals that contribute to superb illustration in picture books.
Part Two (B) (this post) will talk about several more design fundamentals that contribute to superb illustration in picture books.
Part Three will explore language and literary techniques used in quality writing for children.
Part Four will provide a genre summary and list recommended titles in each genre.
Part Five will list 100 excellent author/illustrators for children with either links or a brief overview of their works/style.

A repeat of my copyright caveat: I use a lot of pictures in this post most of which are copyright protected. I did not scan any images into my computer nor upload them. I am simply drawing in images from elsewhere on the web. My purpose in doing so is solely to promote the books depicted. I have not used images from books I do not recommend. I also do not derive any income (monetary or goods and services from my writing); as such I am in no way profiting from the intellectual property of others. Having said all of that, I will remove all embedded images except for book covers from this post and replace them with external links in 7 days time. In the interim, should I receive any requests from copyright holders to remove images from this post, I will do so immediately.

And now, to pick up where we left off...

You may recall that I am relying on The On-line Visual Literacy Project at Ponoma College for my terms of reference in defining the 11 basic design components of all visual communication. I have grouped these components into 4 broad categories.
The building blocks (dot, line, shape, and texture) (the subject of my last post in this series)
Movement (motion and direction)
Colour (hue, value, and saturation), and
Perspective (scale and dimension)

The rest of today's post will look at movement, colour, and perspective.


From utter stillness, motion emerges:
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Rob Gonsalves holds stillness and motion in tandem in this surreal illustration featured in Imagine a Night (2003). His paintings have been pulled together in three separate picture books, Imagine a Night, Imagine a Day, and Imagine a Place, all with text provided by Sarah L. Thomson. The text doesn't shine so well as the illustrations but the books are stunning eye candy for all ages.

Picture book artists create motion on a fixed, 2-dimensional plane by using using multiple techniques, and, unlike the Gonsalves illustration would you have you believe, the motion created is, most often, pure silly fun.
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David Shannon's title character from No David! (1998) makes a mad dash from his bath. The oversized sidewalk seems to spit him out, limbs extended and body soaring skyward.


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Barry Moser's rabbit leaps above the title of this book: Jump!: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit by Joel Chandler Harris, Van Dyke Parks, Malcolm Jones (1986). The torn blue backdrop that is slightly akimbo reinforces the motion suggested by the image.

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Moser again on the cover of Margie Palanti's Earthquack! (2002). Even the letters in the title are subject to seismic upheaval.



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Lane Smith's retro, space-age tumble into the abyss on the cover of Scieszka's Math Curse (1995).

And now, a few motion-centric illustrations that bring me joy:

Candace Fleming's Smile Lily, 2004 Image Link

Helen Cooper's continuation of the Pumpkin Soup story, Delicious, 2007.
Me and My Sister, Ruth Ohi, 2005.

Linda Bailey's Stanley's Party illustrated by Bill Slavin, 2003.

One of my favourite object lessons in motion could not be found on the web but I'm sure most of you will be able to picture the image immediately if I simply type the words, "LET ME DRIVE THE BUS!!!!!!"

While motion suggests movement on the page, direction prompts the movement of your eye over the page.

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In this illustration from Barbara Reid's Sing a Song of Mother Goose (1987), Jack and Jill are pure motion; their tumble down the hill, though, directs the reader's eye straight to the page turn, for one does not linger in the verbally tripping land of the nursery rhyme.


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Harold's policeman also points to the page turn with his arm and his eyes. (Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, 1955) In the illustration from No David! above, the sidewalk forces our eyes to follow David's streak to freedom.


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Peggy Rathmann's heroic quest, The Day the Babies Crawled Away (2003), features a driving, rhyming cadence that is accompanied by illustrations that move the reader's eye from top corner left to bottom corner right. As such, the story tumbles along until the pattern stops abruptly when our hero and his infant charges get trapped at the bottom of a cliff. At this point in the story, the black frame of the page surrounds them on three sides, effectively holding them captive. Sadly, I could not find an image online to show the trapped scene, but I think you can imagine what I mean.

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Anthony Browne's Willy is a nose-in-the book sort of fellow. No so, his friend Hugh, who attracts the annoyed stares of the other library patrons. The entire meaning of this illustration from Willy and Hugh (1991) is told by following the direction of the eyes. You may need to follow the image link to get the full effect of this one.

And finally, here's one more marriage of motion (the font, the girl with arms uplifted) and direction (the buildings) acting in harmony. Robert Neubecker's Wow! City! (2004)


Colour has become a dominant design principle in illustrated books for children over the last several decades. Classics, such as Johnson's Harold books and McCloskey's Make Way For Ducklings or Blueberries for Sal, however, are evidence that illustration can be divine on a monochromatic scale.



From Blueberries for Sal (1948) Image Link

Other books, such as Richard McGuire's Orange Book (1992), which uses only the complementary colours of orange and blue, or Cathy Stinson's Red is Best (1982), which emphasizes the narrator's preferred colour, or the wordless picture book Yellow Umbrella (2001) by Jae Soo Liu deal in the essence of hue.






Hue is plucked straight from the colour wheel and comes in the infinite combinations of those three primary colours: red, blue and yellow.

Bob Staake's The Red Lemon (2006)

from Fish Eyes: A Book You Can Count On by Lois Ehlert (1990) Image Link

A picture can comprise mainly warm hues:

a cross-section of the old white cabin in Delicious by Helen Cooper (2007) Image Link

Or cool hues:

From Rob Gonsalves' Imagine a Place (2008) Image Link

Sometimes the lifeblood of the image is a pocket of warm colour lying in a sea or sky of cool:

Marie-Louise Gay's Stella: Star of the Sea (English language version) (1999)

Christopher Myers' Wings (2000)

Value refers to the amount of light or dark in an image and the interplay between them.

From Peggy Rathmann's The Day the Babies Crawled Away (2003) Image Link

From Creation by Gerald McDermott (2003) Image Link

Whereas Beatrix Potter uses value to show the warmth of the hearth in winter,


Chris Van Allsburg plays with value to eerie effect in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), a suggestive, imaginative picture book for elementary aged children.

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Ed Young's mice sparkle against their black backdrop in Seven Blind Mice (1992), and

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Ted Harrison's depiction of the Aurora Borealis feels like stained glass, so filled with light are his colours. From O Canada (1992).

Saturation deals with the amount of grey that influences a colour.
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In Janell Canon's Stellaluna (1993), the contrast of the bats who lack colour saturation with the highly saturated night sky provide maximum visual impact. The resulting ultra-realism emphasizes the vulnerability of the bats, creatures that the reader may not normally sympathize with.

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In Knuffle Bunny (2004), Mo Willems splashes highlights of mid-saturated colours over top of black and white photo stills of a Brooklyn neighborhood to add a family atmosphere to the city backdrop. His illustrations often look like animation stills.

The use of water colours produces a canvas of lightly saturated colours.

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In many books, and Barbara McClintock's Dahlia (2002) is a fine example here, such illustrations have a rural or old-fashioned feel to them, no doubt because they hearken back to the 19th and early 20th styles of early masters in the genre:


Randolph Caldecott Image Link


Kate Greenaway Image Link


Leslie Brooke Image Link


and Beatrix Potter Image Link

And then there is Norton Juster's Hello, Goodbye Window, illustrated by Chris Raschka, that conjures up a rustic nostalgia by using mid-saturated, high value colours.
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If you want to see what Rashka has to say about his approach to illustrating this book, read the engaging caption he put on one of his pictures that was reproduced for the New York Times.

Raschka uses a similar style for a cover of the Horn Book Magazine. Deelish.


Highly saturated colours often, but not always, suggest an urban or contemporary setting, partly because contemporary printing technology allows for the mass reproduction of rich colours.

Here is Raschka again with Yo! Yes? (1993)

Vera B. Williams' A Chair for My Mother (1982). Image Link

Then there's the tropical feel of Dayal Kaur Khalsa' My Family Vacation (1988):

Highly saturated colours also feature prominently in many folk tales. Different colour combinations can be suggestive of different cultures or ethnicities:

Leo and Diane Dillon's Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears: A West African Tale (1975)

Ricardo Keens-Douglas' The Nutmeg Princess; illustrated by Annouchka Galouchko (1992) (a folk tale from Grenada)

Gerald McDermott's Raven: A Trickster Tale From the Pacific Northwest (1993).

Phew. Colour dang near killed me. I hope you're still with me. We're coming down the home stretch.

Last but not least, we come to perspective and the two visual techniques that help to determine it: dimension and scale.

Dimension refers to the level at which a reader's eye encounters an image. Are we viewing the scene from on high? Are we looking up from the ground? Or are we meeting the image at eye level?
Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry--Really, Really Angry (1999), shows the child reader what a temper tantrum looks like from a child's eye view.

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When Sophie explodes, the dimension is eye level. When Sophie runs away and feels very small, the reader sees her as a speck on the landscape. By carefully manipulating dimension, the artist aligns the reader's sympathies with her character. Throughout the book we identify with Sophie and can therefore better empathize with her situation.

Now you tell me, in this illustration from David Wiesner's Tuesday (1991) are we meant to identify with the people who inhabit the town or the town's mysterious night time visitors?

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Scale is similar to dimension but it is intrinsic to the picture itself rather than relying on the reader as viewer. Scale can simply let us know the size of one object relative to another as is the case in this picture from Wiesner's June 29, 1999:
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And scale can sometimes make you smile:

From David Shannon's Duck on a Bike (2002) Image Link

Alternatively, scale can convey the emotional crux of a situation. Take for example the day Willy the Wimp accidentally bumps into Hugh:

From Anthony Browne's Willy and Hugh (1991)Image Link

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In regaling you with examples of how the 11 design principles work in picture books, it was my hope that you would see how smart illustrations, when combined with visual literacy skills on the part of the reader, can contribute to the overall experience of reading a book. Do I kid myself that my daughter sees all this when she is looking at books?

No. Not for a second. But she does see a lot of things in illustrations that I don't catch right off. We also spend a lot of time talking about the pictures in her books in an effort to tease out both our ways of seeing. Books that are flatly illustrated don't allow us to open up the conversation. They don't influence our mood or emotions as we are reading. The really good books do, though, and each time I come back to those books to figure out why, the answer is usually right there in front of me in their finely crafted illustrations.

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OK, you all need a break from this so I won't post again in this series for at least a week if not longer. Truth be told, I need a bit of a break too. This was some hard work finding all those pictures and then making them fit my big picture. Next up, I'll be savouring the flavour of words. Mmmmmm, tasty words.

How to know when a book is superb: pictures edition, part 1

This post is the second in a series about identifying and selecting quality children's books for the preschool set. Part 1 is here. Parts 2b, 3, 4, and 5 will follow in the next couple of weeks ... or longer. These posts are likely going to be long-winded so I want to give my readers lots of time off in-between.

Copyright caveat: I use a lot of pictures in this post most of which are copyright protected. I did not scan any images into my computer nor upload them. I am simply drawing in images from elsewhere on the web. My purpose in doing so is solely to promote the books depicted. I have not used images from books I do not recommend. I also do not derive any income (monetary or goods and services from my writing); as such I am in no way profiting from the intellectual property of others. Having said all of that, I will remove all embedded images except for book covers from this post and replace them with external links in 7 days time. In the interim, should I receive any requests from copyright holders to remove images from this post, I will do so immediately.

On with the show...

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

The rest of today's post will look at the building blocks. My next post will cover movement, colour and perspective.

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



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

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

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

Richard McGuire's Orange Book, 1993


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

The claustrophobic square and rectangle...


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...with their promise of escape.

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

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

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

An aside:
If your child has moved past the random scribble in fine motor skill development (mine has not), check out the books of Ed Emberly. Alternatively, go to his website where you will find countless drawing exercises that let kids turn the dot, the line, and the fundamental shapes into just about any object under the sun. Voila:


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

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Canadian Barbara Reid models her illustrations out of clay before they are transferred to paper for printing. This illustration is from Effie, 1999. The computer screen does not do justice to the level of detail in her art. Take, for example, this image from her version of Noah's ark entitled Two By Two, 1992.
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If you haven't read a book with Barbara Reid illustrations, hurry out and do so immediately. As an aside, there is a wonderful detail in this illustration: Noah's wife (dressed in green on the middle deck) has just realized that she's stepped in dung and is looking at the bottom of her shoe in disgust.

Wallace Edwards supplements detail with competing colours and patterns to create a textured look. from Wallace Edwards' Alphabeasts, 2002.

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

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

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OK, out of 11 design fundamentals, I have now covered 4 and the post is waaaay long. Stay tuned for part b in a few days. In the meantime, ask yourself as you read stories to your kids, "does this picture add something of value to the book? Does it create mood, set tone, establish character? Is the image energetic or peaceful? Does it extend the mind in interesting ways beyond what is conveyed by the words on the page? How does it accomplish its task?"

Now here's a question for all of you: What picture book or illustrator's style do you like in particular and why? Don't be shy to answer. I love nothing more than learning about what makes children's books work. All other comments or discussion points are welcome as well.