Olivia By Ian Falconer Analysis

The combination of images and text used in picture books help captivate a reader’s attention to the story as a whole. One picture book that uses the relationship between image and text is Olivia by Ian Falconer. The pictures in the two-page spread above are an excellent representation of this relationship. First, the artwork is composed of gauche and graphite along with a digital reproduction of a Degas painting. The use of these mediums lends themselves to creating a value of light versus dark throughout the spread. On the verso page, the reader sees the use of gradation on the characters and frame. This use of the gray scale in contrast with the flat contour linework give them a three-dimensional quality. Additionally, the reader views the
First, the use of understated serif text (Bang, 113), coupled with the minimalistic spread allows the reader to see that the style is consistent in their relationship together. The story of Olivia is a narrative style picture book written in the present tense. Falconer’s writing style gives way to several literary elements. For example, the sentence on the recto page, “What could she be thinking?” gives way to questioning, involving the reader in the critical thinking process. In addition to, sentence predictability such as, “Olivia likes,” and “Olivia looks” this technique is used to guide the reader with simple sentence structure seamlessly throughout the
The implied reader must know from the spread that this is a work of fiction. As Horning (2010) suggests, “In the area of fiction, we get a clearer breakdown by age level, as specific forms of fiction have been created to meet the unique needs and interests of children at various ages.”(P.21). These imaginative scenarios lend themselves to the reader that they must understand that pigs do not walk on their hind legs, or wear clothing. These pigs have been humanized for the story to provide pleasure and humor in reading. The reader must know what a work of art is, why people look at them and where they are found (connecting the space the characters are in, to the word museum in the text). Through questioning in the text the reader must also understand what it means to contemplate something. Also, the reader must understand within the language of the text that commas instruct the reader to pause. In addition to, the word Olivia being capitalized in the middle of a sentence means it is a pronoun. The use of decoding skills, such as looking at the image for clues will need to be used by the reader. These skills will be later used in the holistic approach to understanding what the reader should do. Which is, to understand that the text has meaning, to comprehend the meaning of the letters and then words and understand what they mean constructed in sentence form.