Visual Literacy: flying to another place
In the second of a new mini- series on visual literacy for Books for Keeps, Piet Grobler discusses creating a sense of place, time and mood.
first article on visual literacy, this place may be created by the subject matter of the illustrations and the chosen medium, colours and techniques used. In the following examples, we will see how, in addition to that, the arrangement or composition of elements, the emphasis or focus, as well as repetition, rhythm, sequence and proportion can also be instrumental in creating this ‘place’ where the story unfolds.
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The first flight I’d like to refer to happens to be called First Flight. This book by Italian-born illustrator Sara Fanelli is, like all her books, not only exceptional for its innovative images, but also for a very strong design sensibility. Every single element on the illustrated page contributes either to the communication of the subject matter of the narrative or to the ambience needed to set the scene. In this story of a baby butterfly struggling to take off in successful flight, Fanelli uses graphic devices like dotted lines to indicate the flight path (or fall!) of the main character. Even the placing of the copy – only one word per line in a very tall paragraph – adds to the sense that gravity gets the better of the young butterfly.
The use of collage is very suitable as the references to other paintings,
scientific illustration, photographs and graphic
design iconography adds an element of realism and of universality and timelessness. Little butterfly’s journey spans times from the present to Leonardo da Vinci and places from Scotland to China: an exaggerated reality of make-belief and fantasy, set solidly in the real world.
Most of the pages indicate a divide by the combination of two richly coloured surfaces (wall paper, printed paper or painted
good picture book is likely to be a flight of fantasy that manages to take the reader along to a place elsewhere. As said in the
paper) hinting at the difference between land and sky. When our main character succeeds in flying at last, however, the page is white – as translucent as the air high above where she manages to go now. We see little butterfly repeated several times on the same double page indicating her movement through the sky. She is placed from left to right to coincide with the direction of our reading.
David Wiesner takes us on another flight with Three Pigs. The three little pigs from the well-known story escape from their own narrative by jumping out of their book onto the white paper of the book that we, the readers are holding in our hands. We soon see other books-within-books and the pigs trot happily into those to join characters from other well-known stories and nursery rhymes – each executed in a different medium and visual language.
At one stage one of the pigs come close to the page like a character from a film might come close to the screen to have a look at the audience on the ‘other side’, saying: ‘I think … someone’s out there’. The characters are conscious of the fact that they are ‘acting’ in a book and they are conscious of the format in which they are finding themselves. This device, called meta-fic tion is,
inter -te x tual introducing characters
like the of
from
w ell-kno wn stories, a feature often found in post-modernist picture
In books like these, the readers are expected to engage with the construction of the narrative in order to make sense of it. The
12 Books for Keeps No.216 January 2016
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