Picture books, digital texts and visual literacy

What an inspiring day the PETAA Picture This! conference in Sydney was. This post is a follow up to my presentation at the conference on Friday and aims to trigger off the ideas I spoke about during the presentation. If you have any queries or comments please email me, I'd love to hear from you.

Here is a brief outline of some of the books and digital texts I spoke about, and some of the visual grammar concepts that these texts exemplify.

The Windy Farm by Doug McLeod and Craig Smith and landcarelife.com are texts linked via their environmental themes. The Landcare L.I.F.E campaign aid shows shifts in Distance and Angle throughout the clip. The viewer is positioned close up and at eye level with people, animals and insects, while the distance and angle zoom out and above when landscapes and countries are shown. These techniques are the visual equivalent to 'Think Globally, Act Locally' environmental catch cry.

Rules of Summer by Shaun Tan is available in print based format and as an App. These texts are good examples of the way salience is created using the colour red, areas of high contrast and movement (in the case of the app) to attract the attention of the reader and viewer and guide the eye through the text.

Sophie Scott Goes South by Alison Lester and http://www.antarctica.gov.au/webcams can be used to compare the effects of different levels of visual modality. The picture book is illustrated with images drawn by children in response to Alison's diary of her trip to Antarctica alongside of Alison's drawings of her alter ego, the character Sophie. These illustrations are examples of low modality images, while the webcam shows actual footage of the voyage of the Aurora Australis icebreaker and is an example of high modality images.

The Treasure Box by Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood and an article on refugees from Behind the News are good texts for discussing and comparing the visual concept of layout. Given and new or left to right layout is used in Freya's illustration of the characters from The Treasure Box leaving their war torn home on the left of the page and moving towards the hope of safety and security on the right side of the picture. A similar image showing the movement of refugees is part of the BTN article. However, the movement occurs from the back ground to the foreground, the refugees move towards the viewer exemplifying the movement of the featured young refugee to Australia.

The print based texts Iqal by Francesco D'Adamo and Ziba Came On A Boat by Liz Lofthouse and Robert Ingpen and video texts Somethings Cost More Than You Realise and What's Behind The Label are linked by the theme of childhood threatened by child labour and forced migration and are resources for teaching many literacy skills. The book covers are examples of close-up shots of the main characters' faces. The desaturated colour choice creates a sober mood that foreshadows the themes of each story. The strong lighting on the right side of the faces of the characters in the books and the main character of What's Behind The Label add to the mood and indicate that metaphorically these children live under the shadow of their circumstance. Somethings Cost More Than You Realise can also be analysed in terms of it's given and new layout with a split screen showing a day in the life of an Australian boy on the left side of the screen and a day in the life of a boy held in child labour on the right side of the screen.

Many of the books mentioned here are featured on the PETAA website where you can find units of work that I have written using them and other CBCA award shortlisted books.