An Undervalued Gift

In a world where games beep and TVs blare, the wordless picture book Float by Daniel Miyares emulates the silence of being alone in nature with one's own thoughts.

Interior from Float by Daniel Miyares

Readers get a sense of what the boy is thinking through his actions. He creates a boat from a sheet of newspaper, jumps in puddles and follows his boat along its path. We see the scope of his world in the reflection of a large puddle created by the rainstorm on which his boat sails. The boy's yellow slicker, hat and matching boots result in splashes of yoke-colored action across the otherwise variegated grays of the pages, acting as a golden spotlight on the young hero's progression.

Interior from Float by Daniel Miyares

When his boat goes down a drain and gets waterlogged, we watch the boy start over with another newspaper page and a new improvised mode of transport. He's completely content keeping his own company.

Summer camp, swimming lessons and art classes are wonderful organized activities. But the freedom to explore the world and be content in solitude is an undervalued gift.

Lasting Color

Marla Frazee is not shy about using colors. Just look at All the World (written by Liz Ganlon) and A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever (which she wrote as well as illustrated), both Caldecott Honor books. But in her latest book, The Farmer and the Clown, the absence of words and her sparing use of color highlight the shift a little clown makes in a farmer's life. The clown introduces not only color, but also a new perspective--even a sense of joy--to the farmer's seemingly ceaseless routine.

Interiors from The Farmer and the Clown

The colors of the train traveling on the tracks at the edge of the farmer's property telegraph "circus": fun, entertainment, escape from the daily grind. The little treasure the train inadvertently leaves behind ripples through the farmer's world, disrupting his daily rhythms in the best possible way. The farmer, usually dressed in a crisp white shirt and earth-colored pants, wears red pajamas, suggesting he only lets go at day's end. And boy, does that toddler clown give him permission to let go--making faces, juggling eggs, packing a picnic basket.

In the parting images, Frazee lets readers know that the clown has made a lasting impact on the farmer--he will carry the joy he shared with the little clown always.

A Way to Heal

Raúl Colón

 Draw! is Raúl Colón's most autobiographical work. He suffered from asthma as a child, and often spent hours alone in his bedroom drawing while the other children played outside. We had a chance to speak with him recently for School Library Journal about the making of Draw! Here is an excerpt.

You’ve mentioned that you begin your books with text and pictures. How did you arrive at a wordless story for Draw!?
I created a mock-up for the book that included text. But I couldn’t quite finish it, so I showed it to my editor, Paula Wiseman. She asked, “What do you think about telling the story just in pictures?” So that’s what I did. I added some illustrations, a few sketches, and reworked it.

In the book, your palette changes when the child drawing in bed imagines himself on safari.
Yes. I thought about The Wizard of Oz [the black-and-white and the color sequences] and chose a muted palette for this boy’s life at home and then moved to full color when his imagination transports him to a different world. Although muted, I wanted the pictures to be colorful enough so children didn’t think that those scenes were unreal. But I still needed to transition to Africa. Did the boy go by boat? By plane? I wanted to show that he transported himself to Africa so readers see the pictures come out of his head.

From Draw!

Tell us about the sequence of four images of the rhinoceros charging the boy, each one showing the animal getting closer and closer.
The idea, taken from comics, shows the passage of time. We’re fascinated with the illustrations and snapshots and paintings we see in museums, because the artists are freezing time. We can look at them over and over again. We see things moving all the time, but seeing something frozen--where we can study it--is fascinating. With the rhino, I wanted to show movement. How large, or how close he gets--the viewer has to figure that one out.

Let’s talk about the closing scene, when the boy gets out of bed and shares his artwork with his peers.
In my experience visiting schools, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m showing the work that I do to other people. The reason artists draw and musicians play, is that we want to communicate, to share what comes through us with other people.

Read the full interview.

Visual Grammar

Alison Jay has always created a visual story line in her books, and her beachside adventure Out of the Blue follows that established pattern. Her alphabet book (A B C) and counting book (1 2 3) teach youngest children these early concepts, and they also give them a plot line to follow that unfolds entirely through the illustrations. Out of the Blue, with no words, tells a complete story--two children make friends, take shelter from a storm, and rescue a giant octopus. It's liberating for children who are just learning to read because they can make up their own story.

Jay helps youngest children build confidence, as she reinforces all that they know: pages move from left to right, children can point out the heroes in the book who appear repeatedly (the boy and the girl) and they can follow the secondary characters down the beach. They do not need to decode words to "read" the story.

This spring at the Bank Street College of Education, Stephen Savage spoke about “visual grammar” using his book Where’s Walrus? to explain his idea. He spoke of the text and illustrations as “the harmony and melody of the song” and pointed to silent movies as “the original wordless books.” He explained the four components he believes are essential to books without words:

1)  The close-up
2)  Color/contrast
3)  Design/branding
4)  Pattern/repetition

You can see these elements most clearly in Where's Walrus?, but they also come into play in Alison Jay's work.

Children take in everything around them. They are sponges, absorbing how the world works long before they have words to explain what they're seeing. These elements, of which Savage spoke so eloquently, and which Jay also employs in her books, help children unlock the story within the book and also to use those strategies to make sense of the events in their own experiences.

Wordless Books & Visual Literacy

For a child who cannot yet read--who cannot decode letters as symbols that represent sounds--wordless books such as Journey by Aaron Becker give them a way to tell the story they see. 

From Journey by Aaron Becker

Children will notice the only colors that pop in the opening pages of Journey: a boy's purple crayon, and a girl's red one. Like Crockett Johnson's Harold and his purple crayon, the girl uses her red one to create a world. In her case, it leads her out of her alienating sepia-toned cityscape and into a lush world of forests, interconnected waterways and steampunk airships. Eventually, a purple bird leads her back to the boy and his purple crayon. She is no longer alone. 

Stephen Savage's Where's Walrus? is a terrific introduction to wordless books for children. Its direct, implicit puzzle--finding Walrus, who's escaped from New York's Central Park Zoo--allows them to pick the hero from a line-up based on his unique characteristics (flippers, tail, tusks, etc.). The book gets them thinking about patterns, likenesses and differences. Generous white space and bold colors repeated for maximum effect make this an ideal book for giving children the idea of how to "read" a purely visual narrative. 

Green by Laura Vaccaro Seeger includes a few words, to describe the bountiful shades of green that she showcases in the book, but the larger narrative goes unstated. A parent-child relationship that centers around a tree, which begins as a sapling and grows to be the anchor of their home, suggests the cycle of life. Her greens go from the concrete and literal ("lime green" / "pea green") to the more abstract ("all green" / "never green"). She uses die-cuts in the pages to train children's eyes on the details she wants to reveal to them. It's an ingenious way to demonstrate ways to inspect artwork carefully and unlock its secrets.

Jerry Pinkney's Caldecott Medal–winning The Lion and the Mouse, with its breathtaking landscapes of the Serengeti teeming with hidden treasures, invites children to pore over the pictures for flowers and creatures, large and small. Pinkney's gorgeous spreads of grandeur composed from the tiniest details echo Aesop's overriding theme of the interconnectedness and interdependence of nature's plants and species. 

Open any one of these books (and hopefully all four) to unlock how much your youngster has to say about what he or she sees.