There are a number of awards that are given to children based literature. They include; The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, The Caldecott Medal, The Carnegie Medal, The Christopher Award, The Coretta Scott King Award, The Guardian Award for Children's Fiction, The Hans Christian Andersen Medal, The Jane Addams Children's Book Award, The Kate Greenaway Medal, The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, The Mildred L. Batchelder Award, The National Book Award for Young People's Literature, The Newbery Medal, The Phoenix Award, The Pura Belpre Award, The Tomas Rivera Mexican American Children's Book Award.
Some of the award-winning children literature books include Victor Martinez's Parrot in the Oven: MiVida, Gloria Whelan's Homeless Bird, Kathryn Erskine's Mocking Bird, Thanhha Lai's Inside Out and Back Again et cetera.
Picture This-How Pictures Work
I first heard of the book through a referral from a friend. At first, I was a bit skeptical about reading the book because of the simplicity of the front and the back cover illustrations but later decided to give it a try just so that I could get a glimpse of how pictures work. I have always been wondering of the roles that multiple colors and shapes play in communicating the theme of a picture. This was particularly so as I have been visiting quite a number of galleries and painting workshops but never got to understand the finer details behind pictures that make them somehow special.
In her book, Molly Bang uses Little Red Riding Hood's fairy tale story to help the reader get to understand better how pictures work in the most elementary basis. She uses the emotional story of the Little Red Riding Hood and the big bad wolf to bring out the meaning and effect of different colors and shapes. Molly Bang explains the reasons as to why a triangular shape makes us feel some sense of stability or the tensions evoked by diagonal lines. She explains why curves appear claiming and why objects with the same color appear more associated than those with different colors; the reason behind red feeling hot and dangerous while blue appearing cold and calmer than red (Bodmer, 2001).
Molly Bang uses a number of scenarios with differing shapes and colors to change the mood and general feelings of the readers towards the classic fairy tale (Bang, 2000). She thus manages to illustrate the critical role that shapes and colors play in the development of a story from a given state to an entirely different one.
About The Author/ Illustrator
Molly Garrett Bang is an American illustrator for children's books who has been runners-up thrice for the Caldecott Medal. She later became runners up for the Greenaway Medal in Britain and a winner of the Phoenix Picture Book Award in 2016 for her picture book Goose. Her other works include The Goblins Giggle And Other Stories (1973), Dawn (1983), and My Light (2004) among others. Picture This- How Pictures Work was first published in 1991.
Plans. My initial plans of getting the book were to first look up for some book reviews on the book available online and scheme through them before embarking on purchasing an electronic copy from online book retailers. Since books meant for children are not as involving as those intended for adults, my plans were to read the book once or maybe twice, but there was no need for me to take notes as the story behind the book was quite simple to comprehend.
Works Cited
Bang, Molly. "Picture This: How Pictures Work. 1991." New York: SeaStar (2000).
Bodmer, George. "How Picturebooks Work (review)." The Lion and the Unicorn 25.3 (2001): 444-448.
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