Week 3: Words and Pictures Disagree

A picture book’s words and its pictures don’t have to say the same thing. Most of the time we assume they do — the text describes what’s happening, and the picture shows it happening. But that relationship is a choice, not a rule, and changing it changes what the reader has to do to understand the page.

There are at least three ways words and pictures can relate to each other:

• Agree — the picture supports what the words say. This can give a page clarity, reinforcement, and certainty, though pure agreement can also leave little for the reader to work out between the two.
• Contradict — the picture shows something incompatible with what the words say. The gap the reader has to fill can affect trust, tension, humour, or how well the reader thinks they understand a character — not only comedy.
• Reveal — the words and picture don’t contradict each other, but one supplies information the other leaves out. The text might report what a character says, while the picture shows something that character hasn’t noticed.

Difference on its own isn’t automatically meaningful. Before making words and pictures disagree, it’s worth asking:

• what does the reader learn from the gap?
• who knows more — the narrator, the character, the image, or the reader?
• does the relationship change how the reader interprets the scene?
• would the page lose something if the words and picture simply matched?

Today’s studio holds one sentence fixed and makes three pictures for it — one that agrees, one that contradicts, and one that reveals something the sentence never says — so you can compare what each relationship asks of the reader.