Jon's first tenet: Stories don’t exist outside of how they are told.
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| Jon Klassen reading left to right. |
He uses the example of The Red Balloon, which is incredible
as a movie, but when turned into a picture book, falls a little flat. The
movement of the balloon, which made the film magical, can’t be replicated in
the static images of a book. By tailoring your project to its intended format you're doing your story a lot of favors and the better your work will be.
Storytelling is teaching: It's so much fun to hear Jon talk about the choice of color and
text in I Want My Hat Back.
Visual storytelling is teaching with symbols, Jon’s stellar
example is Super Mario Bros.
Jon talked about the power of limitations to make your work better: P.D.
Eastman’s Sam and the Firefly has an incredibly limited palette which helps the creator and reader focus on what’s important, each color serves as a symbol in the
story.
Even though I’ve been studying the design and layout of
Where The Wild Things Are for a zillion years, Jon is showing us things about
it I never noticed before—fascinating!
Style should never get in the way of storytelling. Jon uses
the example of Harold and the Purple Crayon, and how the art Harold makes,
those thick purple lines, that style doesn’t bolster or match the style and
talent of Crockett Johnson’s normal style, it’s done to serve the story
Make up rules and then hold on to them: Jon says you only have to hold on to your rules for 40 pages
and then you can drop them.
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