Picture This is Molly Bang’s insightful book about how the visual composition of images works to engage emotions, and how the elements of an artwork can give it the power to tell a story. Why are diagonals dramatic? Why are curves calming? Why does red feel hot and blue feel cold? First published in 1991, Picture This has changed the way artists, illustrators, reviewers, critics, and readers look at and understand art
- Week 10 Read Page 1- 54 molly-bang-part-1
- Week 11 Read Page 55 – end molly-bang-part-2
Blog Post:
Each week, choose a compositional strategy you from the reading that you find compelling. Explain how it works and how you could relate it to your art.
As simple as the images were used in the remake of little red riding hood from Picture This, I would like to use placement as one of the main strategies in my work. The placement of the objects in her story got a different response from me like the decision to make little red riding hood small compared to the trees, and also the decision to make the wolf take up the bottom half of the page. Making it seem like he is in pursuit of her.
Picture This is Molly Bang made a clear point on connecting the story to shapes/colors. The strategy that her work in Little Red Riding Hood was taking step by step from the story and transitioning that to her shapes and placement. She also changed the color at the end, because giving a story a figure was the first step. I want to use her strategy in making the figure from the story and how simple figure can tell so much more.
In Molly Bang, Picture This, Molly demonstrates a great connection between shapes and the story of The Little Red Riding Hood. When relating shapes to the story, she symbolizes the color of the shapes as emotions. That really caught my attention because Molly didn’t need facial expression to show the mood of a character.Instead she showed color and shapes. Another strategy Molly uses when creating this story was the positions and size of the shapes. For instance, when she would create the scene of when riding hood was in the woods.Molly would position the trees in front of riding hood to feel as the reader is involved in the scene. The author would also use the position of the shapes to create the mood of the scenes. This strategy I plan on using.