From Cover to Cover (11 page)

First, consider the challenge Hurd faced in illustrating the text of
Goodnight Moon
. Superficially, the entire story is set in the same bedroom and consists of a list of objects present in the room. But Hurd understood the text on a deeper psychological level and used his understanding to convey meaning through the illustrations. In a study of the psychology inherent in Margaret Wise Brown’s picture book texts, Dr. Timothy M. Rivinus and Lisa Audet point out that the text in
Goodnight Moon
provides a means of helping the child to separate from a parent at bedtime: “What could be more in keeping with helping the child to acquire—through simple language, plot, poetry, and picture—the pleasure of separation from a parent, to the natural embrace of sleep, to the stars and the quiet night? Learning to be alone in the company of a reading parent is dress rehearsal for the real thing.” If we take time to look at Clement Hurd’s illustrations with a critical eye, we can see how he managed to get this sense across in his artwork as he interpreted the surface elements in the story.

Hurd sets up a predictable pattern by alternating color full-page spreads illustrating the bedroom with pages on which details from the room (a bedside table, two kittens, etc.) are shown in shades of gray. This pattern adds variety and interest, but it also serves to illuminate the theme of Brown’s text, as the achromatic pages help the child viewer focus on pieces of the whole as separate entities.

The color pages illustrate essentially the same scene over and over again with subtle shifts in perspective. This lends a sense of visual harmony that slows down the pace of what would surely be a rapid-fire
story if the perspective jumped around from place to place in the room. Straight horizontal lines dominate the composition, leading the viewer’s eye to sweep across the page, taking in the enumerated objects in the room. These contrast with a more subtle, diagonal line emanating from a lighted lamp that points right at the restless child in his bed. The eye is also drawn to the rounded shapes that dominate the center of each picture: a large oval rug and a hearth with a burning fire. These comforting, cozy shapes fill the distance between the child and his mother, suggesting that although they are separated from each other, they are still connected.

A subtle gradation in value occurs throughout the book in the color spreads, as the room grows darker with every turn of the page. We see gradation in shape as the moon slowly moves across the night sky outside the bedroom window. Both show the natural passage of time.

Hurd also uses balance to create a sense of comfort and security. The strong horizontal line that cuts across the center of each double-page spread represents the line between the walls, which are green, and the floor, which is red. Since red and green are complementary colors, this gives the scene a formal balance. They also provide a balance between warm and cool colors, which might reflect the child’s mixed emotions about bedtime.

The achromatic pages show balance as well. The initial pages balance each other by showing different objects of similar size and shape on opposing pages. To accomplish this, Hurd surrounds the objects with amorphous shapes, but as the story progresses, the shapes grow smaller and less like each other, moving from a symmetrical to an asymmetrical balance until we get to the delightfully surprising spread that places “nobody” (a blank page) opposite a bowl of mush. The next achromatic page restores perfect balance in a double-page spread that shows the comforting, familiar horizon of a clear night sky. We might ask ourselves, why
did the artist do this? What effect does it have? Does it merely serve the purpose of illustrating details of the child’s bedroom? Or was the artist aiming for something more? If we think about what happens to balance in the pictures and relate it to the action of the story—a child trying to delay sleep by saying good night to everything he sees in his room—we might speculate that Hurd uses the achromatic pictures to symbolize the process of falling asleep. In the beginning, everything is clear and orderly, but things gradually get smaller and more dreamlike. We sink slowly into nothingness (the blank page) and have a momentary flash of wakefulness in which we see a bowl of mush on the bedside table. In the end, sleep takes over as an endless horizon of the world outside the bedroom window.

By looking closely at just one principle then—balance—we can see that Clement Hurd’s illustrations for
Goodnight Moon
not only complement the story but also actually clarify its meaning in a way that the simple words cannot. They are an integral part of the book and contribute greatly to its success over the decades. And, remarkably, they do it all without being flashy or calling attention to themselves.

MEDIA

An artist chooses a
medium
, such as paint, ink, or cut paper, to project a desired effect. Some artists feel more comfortable working with one medium and they use it in every book they illustrate. Others use different media for different books. In recent years a lot of attention has been placed on artistic media by reviewers and many have demanded more information from the publishers. In response, some publishers place a note on the book’s copyright page about the medium used to create the illustrations. Interesting as these notes may be, it is not really essential to be able to distinguish between gouache and tempera paint in evaluating or commenting about art. It is more important to notice how the use of
paint affects the artistic expression as a whole.

Media can be broadly broken down into
drawing
,
painting
,
printmaking
,
collage
, and
photography
. Combinations of any two or more of these are referred to as
mixed media
. With the technological changes in printing over the past few decades, there has been more reliance on painting and less on drawing and printmaking. Drawing and printmaking emphasize the drawn line and therefore create a
linear style
; whereas paint emphasizes color and tone, a style aptly referred to as
painterly
. Both collage and photography emphasize form and volume, which gives a three-dimensional quality to the art.

D
RAWING

Drawing allows for a wide range of styles and expressions through the use of line and value. Lines can express emotion and movement. They can be light and humorous or heavy and serious. Value conveys depth and volume. The most common media used for drawing are:

Pen and ink
: Makes strong, sure lines that create lively characters and clearly defined settings. Pen and ink is often used to draw pictures that are then colored with paint such as watercolor. Bob Graham uses pen and ink to create detailed background settings and to show a range of human expression in his picture books such as
How to Heal a Broken Wing
. Mice characters come to life with the lively pen-and-ink strokes from artist Kevin Henkes in his beloved series of books about Lilly, Owen, Julius, and Sheila Rae.

Pencil or graphite
: Allows for a full range of value from light to dark to create different moods and a sense of depth. A good example of this range can be seen in the pencil illustrations of Peter McCarty in books such as
Night Driving
, by John Coy, and
Moon Plane
.

Pastel
: Powder color, mixed to the desired hue with white chalk and bound with tragacanth and liquids, is solidly packed and used in a form
that resembles chalk. It has a soft, opaque quality, as is apparent in Beth Peck’s illustrations for
Just Like Josh Gibson
, by Angela Johnson.

Scratchboard
: Rather than drawing per se, the artist uses a sharp instrument to scratch an illustration into a two-layered black-and-white or black-and-multicolored board. Beth Krommes used this technique in Susan Marie Swanson’s
The House in the Night
that features stunning black-and-white illustrations with gold watercolor highlights.

P
AINTING

Painting uses color above all other elements to convey meaning and emotions. Many types of paint are used in picture books. Each begins as a finely ground pigment that is mixed with a different type of liquid to form paint and, as such, has its own distinctive properties.

Gouache
: Powder color mixed with an opaque white. Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s vivid paintings appropriately call attention to the creative process itself in
First the Egg
, a concept book about metamorphosis that concludes with telling a story and painting a picture.

Poster paint
: A coarser version of gouache because the color pigment is not as finely ground. The paintings in
Ten, Nine, Eight
, by Molly Bang, use contrasting colors to create a sense of excitement, while rounded shapes convey security.

Tempera
: Powder color ground in water and mixed with an albuminous, gelatinous, or colloidal medium. Mique Moriuchi used brightly colored tempera paint on pieces of newspaper to illustrate Aileen Fisher’s poem about the life cycle in
The Story Goes On
.

Watercolor
: Powder color bound with gum arabic and glycerine. It is a transparent medium applied with water. By far the most popular medium among children’s book artists who use paint, watercolor opens the door to a tremendous range of expression. Artists can use it to portray quiet, somber scenes or the activity in a crowded, busy place. Watercolor is
an effective medium for detailed portrayals of people and animals. David Wiesner did all these things in his watercolor illustrations for
Flotsam
.

Oil paint
: Powder color mixed with linseed oil. It can be applied thickly to a surface to create texture. Paul O. Zelinsky used oil paint in
Rapunzel
to capture the feeling of Italian Renaissance art.

Acrylic
: Powder color mixed with water-based plastic. Like oil paint, it can be applied thickly to create a textured surface. Yuyi Morales’s acrylic paintings in
Just a Minute
maintain a consistent value throughout to give them the characteristic flat appearance of folk art.

P
RINTMAKING

In printmaking, the artist creates a negative, reversed image on a surface other than paper, such as wood, linoleum, cardboard, metal, or stone. The surface is then inked and pressed against paper so that the image is transferred to the paper. The very earliest children’s books, illustrated with woodcut prints, date back to the sixteenth century; and we have many strong examples of the various printmaking techniques in twentieth-century picture books. With the advances in printing technology, printmaking may be classified as an endangered art form in picture books. One unfailing holdout is the artist Arthur Geisert, who continues to create stunning picture books illustrated with etchings, such as
Nursery Crimes
and
Lights Out
. Other notable recent examples of printmaking in pictures books are Mary Azarian’s woodcut illustrations in
Snowflake Bentley
, by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, and Beckie Prange’s woodblock prints in
Song of the Water Boatman
, by Joyce Sidman.

C
OLLAGE

Fragments of paper, fabric, and other material are glued to a background paper to create collage. Because the fragments are often made up of varying substances and thicknesses, collage accentuates texture. It also
encourages viewers to look closely at the pieces in a composition as a whole. Steve Jenkins’s cut-and torn-paper collages illustrate his dynamic picture books about animals, such as
What Do You Do with a Tail Like This?
and
Actual Size
. Jenkins uses different kinds of paper in his collages to suggest different textures. Lois Ehlert uses objects such as buttons, ribbons, and pieces of cloth for the collages in her picture books; the collages in
Leaf Man
are created completely from actual leaves, positioned on the pages to resemble different kinds of creatures. Artists Christopher Myers and Javaka Steptoe are both known for their illustrations that combine collage and painting.

P
HOTOGRAPHY

Photography is frequently used as an illustration medium in nonfiction books for children. We see photography as illustration in children’s picture books as well, especially in concept books by artists like Tana Hoban, Bruce McMillan, and Margaret Miller. Nina Crews combines photography and drawing to create fantastical images of a child at play in his home in
Below
, and she uses photographs to illustrate her other books as well, such as
The Neighborhood Mother Goose
. Charles R. Smith brilliantly uses a combination of color and black-and-white photographs to tell the same story from two points of view in
Loki & Alex
. Here we see the world from the dog’s point of view in black and white and from the child’s in full color.

D
IGITAL
A
RT

While it’s obvious that most picture books with photographs as illustration use some degree of digital manipulation, it’s not always easy to tell when this is the case with other media. Prominent picture book artists Don and Audrey Wood have been outspoken about their use of digital
art since 1996, but other artists have been less forthcoming. In fact, many artists have played down the fact that they used a computer to create their illustrations. This may be due to an overall feeling in the field that computer-generated art is somehow inferior because it is believed to take less effort. But actually computers are just another tool for the artists. In “How I Learned to Love the Computer,” Lane Smith writes: “The advantages of the computer are endless for an illustrator who likes to experiment. For example, I can now build up an illustration as much as I want without overworking it.”

Some picture-book art is completely computer generated, such as William Low’s
Machines Go to Work
. Low used Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Corel Painter to create artwork that looks hand painted. Other picture book artists use a combination of traditional media and digital manipulation. In
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
, Mo Willems created the cartoon drawings with pencil and then used Photoshop to color them. The same techniques were used by Kim LaFave in
Shinchi’s Canoe
, by Nicola I. Campbell, but for a very different final effect. Whereas Willem’s illustrations are light and comical, LaFave’s are serious and somber.