Customer Reviews

Picture This: How Pictures Work

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This book is for anyone interested in the visual arts.

Using the story of Little Red Riding Hood, Molly Bang explores visual communication by playing with simple geometric shapes and discussing their effect. For example, Molly creates Red as a small triangle but experiments with Red as a square, circle, or amorphous shape.

Later, Molly creates the wolf as as a longer, sleeker triangle with sharper angles that create a sense of danger. She turns the angles into curves to see the impact of angles. She changes the color of the wolf from black to muave. She adds different shapes and colors of eyes; and teeth.

In other words, she constantly experiments - and shows you the experiments - of different composition values and the mood they create. At the end, she summarizes what she learned as rules for composition.

Whether you draw, paint, or take pictures, this book will help you with composition.

I love this book and using it for teaching basic design ideas...a fellow teacher uses it in Psychology! The simple story of Little Red Riding Hood serves as the basis for discussion how line, color, shape, etc. work in art. Such a great idea...wish there were others of this type. I will be using it to teach the elements of art in Art History this fall.

Using the story of Little Red Riding Hood this book is focusing on the basic principles of composing images.

Reduced to the maximum and using simple colors and arrangements of basic elements like circles or triangles, the drawings as well as the short, precise text within this book are pointing out, how simple and complex arrangements within pictures work, transfer obvious (and hidden) messages, how philosophy and psychology witin pictures works. Therefor its a book telling the story why pictures may lie, may influence, may manipulate an observer even though obviously just showing "reality".

Whether you are taking photographs, drawing or designing - this book is a absolute must! A photo/image tells more than thousand words - here you will find the answer how and why. Great to read and watch, easy and fast to understand - even though dealing with a most complex matter.

Finally a personal statement and hint for an esthetes: if you like to possess a book with an outer shape and appearance that promises, what the contents keeps, than you have to buy the nice hard cover version instead of the cheaper soft cover version - it will pay off for sure.

Picture This: How Pictures WorkThis is a great way to teach the elements and principals of art and how even simple shapes, and their placement on a page, can send a very definite message visually. I use this book in my grade 12 Design class. It had been out of print, and when I discovered it was being published again, I quickly ordered several more copies. The new publication is a larger sized book than the original, and although I prefer the original publication size (6 1/4" high x 8" wide) and the fact that the original illustrations were full bleed, I was thrilled to be able to actually get my hands on the book again no matter what.