Understanding the visual language of picture books
The article, Understanding the Visual Language of Picturebooks, taught me that there is a lot more meaning to pictures in a picture book. While reading this article I discovered that there are three different texts to a picture book, which are the written text, design text, and the picture text. These three texts express the meaning of a picture book furthermore than the main meaning of the work. They also are very important when thinking about the information being revealed in the picture book. Teachers and students need to notice the meaning of the pictures throughout the book.
Throughout the article there were also a variety of sources that were discussed. These sources were formalistic, aesthetic/stylistic, mythical, cultural, and historical. In the article it gives an example of the story Bernard Wants a Baby which tells you the written text and shows a picture of the written text but what you don’t notice is that there is much more to the picture that isn’t in the written text. The picture shows that the elephants are wearing different cultural clothes which show that there is the source of cultural in the picture text. This article has taught me more about picture books than I really thought was there.