Paper - Children's Books and Emotions

Children’s book illustrators work within a range of constraints that most artists might find limiting. Their work is commissioned by publishers, who therefore have some control over content. Some have to illustrate someone else’s words, leaving no room for personal editing. And children’s book illustrators always have to keep in mind that what they create will only be seen as a reproduction within a specific book format. But another challenge that they face, which is not widely discussed, is the one that makes children’s book illustration a field of incredible potential. Children’s book illustrators must visually weave stories that are driven by human emotions, and to do so, they must understand their audience, the psychology of their art, and the cultural context their work will belong to.

How are they able to do this? Unlike writers, illustrators don’t have the advantage of literally spelling out a scenario. They have to take a sentence like “Billy is sad,” and create art that can express that Billy is sad, hint at why he might be sad, offer a sense of empathy towards Billy, be careful not to discount their own feelings about Billy, all the while enticing the reader to turn the page. The character’s emotions, the overall emotional theme of the storyline, the reader’s emotions, and the artist’s emotions are all considerations when planning a children’s picture book. The successful books are the ones that are able to create a unity between those things.

The intended audience of a children’s picture book is an important consideration for an artist. Are emotions instinctual, or learned? Children have very little learned experience by the time they are old enough to read, or be read to, between the ages of one to seven. Therefore something like empathy, which requires you to know from past experience just what someone is going through in order to understand and relate to them, is perhaps a harder thing for a child to grasp. A child’s range of emotions is limited, so an artist has to put aside her own vast arsenal of emotions and all the adult associations that come with them, and focus on the fundamental ones. They must ask themselves, “How can I make this relatable to children?”

However, children are rarely the ones who choose which picture books are worthy to be printed or taken off the bookshelf. An artist cannot disregard that peripheral adult audience, or herself for that matter. Doing so would only strip the potential from a picture book, as Selma G. Lanes points out in Through the Looking Glass: Further Adventures & Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. “Adults should never discount their own reactions to books written for children, for no young child’s picture book has any claim to being a work of literature if it appeals only to children. If the work has no resonance for an interested and intelligent older reader, the chances are it has little growing room or lasting appeal for a child either”

After taking the audience into consideration, an artist must then look closely at the storyline. Regardless of whether the artist is also the writer, the artist has to be respectful of the words, but also should feel comfortable asserting her own take on the story. Illustrating a book is, after all, a form of individual creative expression, and that shouldn’t change just because a publisher pays an advance

The storyline may have a certain feeling to it that is obvious at first read, like Corduroy, by Don Freeman, which is about a lonely bear in a department store who wants nothing more than for someone to buy him and take him home.

His actions and inner dialogue throughout the story mimic what a little child might feel in a similar strange situation, with no friends or family to guide them. The feeling is fear.

Corduroy is afraid and helpless because the one thing he needs to do, find a button to fix his overalls, is the one thing he can’t do.

To an adult, this sounds ridiculous, but to a child, that feeling of helplessness is common and often frustrating. A child reading the story knows that Corduroy is searching for his missing button because that’s the reason why someone wouldn’t buy him and take him home. Again, there is a fear of someone not loving you or wanting you because of something you are lacking. The illustrations however do not show little Corduroy paralyzed by fear.

The artist has chosen to show a bear who is curious and a little unsure of himself. When Corduroy tips a lamp over and is discovered by a night watchman, his expression is one of helplessness, which changes to relief when he is put back on his shelf and bought the next day and taken home.

So even though the main emotion behind the storyline of Corduroy is fear and helplessness, the words are encouraging, the illustrations are subtle, and the conclusion assuages those fears. Not simply for the sake of having a “happy ending” but because the audience needs to know that it’s ok to be afraid. If little Corduroy had been left on the shelf and then thrown away in the trash at the end of the story, that would only show the audience that your reward for facing something scary, is something else even scarier.


Expressions, like those on the face of Corduroy, are only one way of showing emotion in children’s picture books. Other tools that illustrators use to create emotional responses in readers are color, shape, and line; the building blocks of art. How can the color red invoke a feeling of anger? How can a drooping line portray sadness? How can an abstract shape feel animated and happy?

To answer those questions, first take an example of two drawings, both done by Van Gogh. The first, entitled “Sorrow” is of a drooping and bent nude woman seated with her head buried in her hands.

The second is of a tree, bare of leaves, with twisted and knotted roots.

In a letter to his brother Theo, Van Gogh explained that he tried to convey sorrow within both drawings, “…clinging to the earth convulsively and passionately and yet being half torn up by the storm. I wanted to express something of the struggle for life, in that pale, thin woman’s figure as well as in the black, gnarled, and knotty roots” (qtd. in Arnheim 452). Why do those roots look sorrowful to us? It could be because of something introduced by John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, which is “a notion…intended to describe, say, the sadness of weeping willows as a figment of empathy, anthropomorphism, primitive animism” (Arnheim 452). However, Rudolf Arnheim, author of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, believes otherwise: "The comparison of an object’s expression with a human state of mind is a secondary process. The willow is not “sad” because it looks like a sad person. Rather, because the shape, direction, and flexibility of the branches convey passive hanging, a comparison with the structurally similar state of mind and body that we call sadness imposes itself secondarily." (452)

According to psychological research, young children prefer color over form. As they mature and age, there is a slow shift to preferring form over color (Sharpe 10). By studying how children express themselves through their own drawings, researchers Alschuler and Hattwick were able to determine a bit about the relationship between color preference and personality.
…children’s use of color, line, form and space, can give distinctive insights into personality. Color has been found to give the clearest insights into the child’s emotional life…children who emphasize color tend to have strong emotional orientation. Specific color preferences and specific patterns of color placement give clues to the emotional makeup of the child. Our data support the view that red is the most emotionally toned of all the colors…Emphasis on red has been found to be associated with either of two extremes: (a) feelings of affection and love; (b) feelings of aggression and hate. (qtd. in Sharpe 14).

Now examine an illustrator who exemplifies the use of color, shape, and line to unify the emotional theme of a children’s picture book; Ezra Jack Keats.

In his book, Whistle for Willie, Keats uses his signature collage style to great affect. He uses bright colors, but not exclusively. He breaks up the flat colors with textures and patterns.

His forms are simple and clear,



and his lines are used strategically to propel the story forward.


The story, about a little boy named Peter who lives in the city and wants nothing more than to learn how to whistle so his dog Willie will come running to him, has an emotional undertone of happiness.

There is no real outside conflict in the story. The challenge of learning to whistle is something Peter imposes on himself. It’s not something he has to do. There is a playful ease to the story that is mirrored in the simple forms and easy gestures of Peter.


Ezra Jack Keat’s stories were driven by clear easy emotions and he used the psychology of color, line, and shape to engage his audience. But the cultural context in which his books lived, was of a racially divided nation in the 1960s. Ezra Jack Keats was one of the first illustrators to create picture books about African American urban life, and even though he strove to do this with sensitivity and compassion, he was castigated “for representing stereotyped details and for not speaking with a Black voice” (Hearn, Clark and Clark 88). Keats, who grew up in Brooklyn, was a white man trying to chronicle a black child’s experience.

So even though Keats understood how to use emotion within his stories to create a bond between artist and reader, his choice to use African American characters as his own vehicle of expression failed to recognize the complicated cultural context in which his books would be viewed and critiqued. Does that make all of his books failures? Absolutely not. If anything his choice to use African American characters in books that became widely popular only opened doors for African American artists. Those artists, like John Steptoe , then went on to provide African American children with truly unique stories that spoke to their own cultural heritage.

All successful children’s book illustrators have learned to take what they know of their audience, their psychological response to color, shape, and line, and their cultural context and use that to create stories driven by emotion. Despite the limitations that come with being a children’s book illustrator, these challenges provide consistent exploration of creative limitations. That is what keeps the field of children’s book illustration interesting, and it is what will keep it populated with talented artists.