Molly Bang’s Big Picture

Picture This: How Pictures Work  by Molly Bang begins by illustrating Little Red Riding Hood with a few basic shapes and four colors. She represents Little Red as a red triangle. This triangle makes Bang feel “stability, balance, a prickliness or alertness, plus warmth, strength, vitality, boldness, and perhaps some sense of danger.” (p. 3) She represents the grandmother, wolf, and forest using shapes in red, black, and white. It’s a fascinating journey, and Molly Bang explains herself in an easy-to-read conversational style. 

For example, she says:

• Smooth, flat, horizontal shapes convey stability and calm. The illustration accompanying this principle is simply a black rectangle that borders the bottom of a white space. 

• Vertical shapes reach upward with a sense of energy. Hence, Bang chooses vertical rectangles to represent the forest in her take on Little Red Riding Hood.  

• Diagonals elicit feelings of motion and/or tension, so she tilts a couple of trees. Will they fall on Little Red?

Bang describes many more visual concepts that infuse illustrations with emotion. And then, near the end of the book, she offers much more than simply a summary. She writes

“But we then go on to make an interesting generalization. Just as we assume that all pointed shapes are sharp, we assume that everything with the same color as these natural constants also shares their inherent qualities: a white swan seems more pure than a mallard duck, a red rose is more expressive of the fire of our love than a pink one, a black crow looks nastier than a cuckoo, and so forth. These secondary associations are completely false, but we make them all the time. . . Color is one of the most powerful elements used in advertising, in storytelling, in propaganda, and in all visual fabrications. Color symbolism is based on a false generalization. And it works—very, very well.” (p. 95) 

And more. . . Bang explains four of her pictures in the story When Sophie Gets Angry: Really, Really, Angry. I’m familiar with this picture book and found her explanations most enlightening. I hadn’t perceived the visual structure of these illustrations before.

And finally . . . there are exercises for the reader on the final few pages. 

Succinct, fascinating, educational, enjoyable. Thank you, Molly.