In picture books, certain visual choices made by the authors create in readers different types of emotion, call for judgement and foster appreciation. That is, readers are expected and encouraged to build a personal relationship with the characters in a narrative or to feel moved by the events in the story world. They are also expected to take a stance with respect to characters’ behaviours and to eventually recognise the worth of ideas presented in the story that are central to the narrative. Regardless of what its nature is, ultimately what is expected is an attitudinal response on the part of the readers.

Narratives teach communal feelings as they lead readers to take up different positions on certain literary elements. When readers are called upon to adopt a position of empathy towards characters and their feelings, the readers’ more primeval emotional reactions are at play. In turn, when they adopt a position of discernment, their responses take on a morally oriented quality, thus shifting from the realm of emotions to the one of judgement, as readers form their opinions about characters’ behaviour. Narratives encourage children to explore their deeper feelings, to eventually form opinions about what is good or bad, right or wrong; narratives gradually –and both explicit and implicitly– teach children to become aware of the world around them and to place a value on different life experiences. Narratives, therefore, play a vital role in children’s literacy development. Not only does reading and discussing stories help children learn about a language and improve their linguistic skills, but it also helps them engage in more complex emotional and mental processes.

In other words, we believe authors make use of a set of visual and verbal resources in order to promote in readers an active responsive understanding of the narrative. We draw upon Bakhtin’s (1953, Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 286) concept of active responsive understanding, taken up by Macken-Horarik (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 286) to claim that authors aim at positioning readers to adopt particular attitudes towards their stories. That is to say, this understanding of emotion, judgement, and appreciation on the part of the readers triggers a dynamic response in them, allowing them to emotionally take part in the story.

It is then very interesting to analyse the resources at play when an active response is prompted as a result of the understanding of the emotional content of a story. To explore feelings and attitudes in any mode of texts, SFL offers a framework of meaning-making choices called appraisal. Appraisal organises “the kinds of attitudes that are negotiated in a text, the strength of the feelings involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned” (Martin & Rose, 2007, p. 25). Appraisal is basically a framework of interpersonal meanings; because of that, the types of attitudes that can be identified have to do with evaluating people’s feelings and behaviour, and with evaluating things. Within the framework of appraisal, different areas organise meanings related to various targets of evaluation. affect explores how people express their feelings. judgement is related to how people judge others’ behaviour personally (by admiring or criticising them) and morally (by praising or condemning them). appreciation is concerned with how people express their attitudes about things and ideas.

With respect to the strength of the feelings involved, graduation becomes crucial in scaling up and down the intensity of emotions. As regards the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned, the system of engagement, which will not be included in this analysis as it is not typical of narratives, comes into play to adopt a position with respect to propositions.

In this chapter we group certain visual resources that serve a key interpersonal purpose: triggering active responsive understanding in readers. We explore how meanings of emotion, judgement and appreciation are expressed by authors through both visual and verbal choices in picture books to elicit attitudinal responses from readers.

Narratives give readers the opportunity to go through a complex and gradual process of understanding of characters and of the world they live in. This process entails different moments in the reading comprehension of picture books, which allows readers to move from more primeval, empathetic emotional reactions to moral evaluations of human behaviour, to more insightful, critical responses to the value of things and phenomena connected to the themes underlying the narrative.

Active responsive understanding can be represented as a continuum, in which emotion, judgement and appreciation are consecutive stages, from the more personal, to the more communal to the more cultural values.

Figure 2 – Active Responsive Understanding Continuum.

Emotion is always related to personal feelings, either positive or negative. Judgement involves institutionalised feelings in terms of what behaviours are morally accepted or not. Similarly, appreciation has to do with the value of things and ideas –including our attitudes about ideas in films, books, paintings, plays, performances of any kind; and feelings about nature: panoramas, sunrises and sunsets, constellations, shooting stars. As with emotion and judgement, things can be appreciated positively or negatively (Martin & Rose, 2007, p. 37; Martin & White, 2005, p. 43). Therefore, emotion sits at the more personal end of the continuum, judgement is placed in the more communal area, and only after we have considered these two aspects of attitude can we move into the realm of appreciation, which is placed at the more culturally oriented end of the continuum.

4.1. Creating emotion

To create emotion, authors invite their audience to take up a position of empathy towards the characters’ feelings. This implies emotional solidarity with characters or, at least, understanding of their motives for feeling the way they do. To achieve this, authors resort to the readers’ capacity to ‘feel with’ a character (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 287).

But what kinds of emotions can be afforded?

When analysing texts from an SFL perspective, emotions are organised into four different clines presented as a system called affect, as illustrated in the tables below. These tables, a summary of those proposed by Martin & White (Martin & White, 2005, p. 48-56), show different types of emotion. There are stronger and more intense emotions that naturally stand out –this is what the authors call surges of behaviour. Other emotions are less powerful and more constant in characters’ personalities –these are labelled dispositions. These concepts can serve as the starting point for analysing emotion in picture books, as these clines can be recontextualised for the analysis of images. When analysing emotion in picture books, it becomes easier to observe behaviours rather than dispositions. To analyse dispositions more thoroughly, the words and the overall context of the narrative should be especially taken into account.

Table 3 – affect (Adapted from Martin & White, 2005, p. 48-56).

Characters’ emotions in images are afforded by overt reactions –such as laughing or crying–, face gestures, and body posture. Other, more subtle resources that come into play are the style of character drawing, depiction style, and the illustrators’ colour choices, ambience.

First, depiction style (Painter et al., 2013, p. 30), the system of character drawing, shows different degrees of detail and realism of the illustration, ranging from a minimalist style to a naturalistic style, which were discussed in general terms in chapter 2 above.

When emotion is concerned, the minimalist style, illustrated in image 3, is more iconic and stylised, focusing mainly on feelings of un/happiness. This style seems to entail a rather detached attitude from the audience towards the characters, in that it does not truly depict a recognisable individual but a universal, archetypal character, establishing some kind of emotional distance between them.

The more detailed generic style, exemplified by image 4, allows for a greater emotional repertoire in characters, including actions that externalise emotions associated with watching, doing and concentrating. The generic style enables the audience to see themselves in the protagonist’s role, taking up a somewhat empathetic stance.

In contrast with the highly schematic minimalist style, which conveys characters’ emotions more explicitly, the naturalistic style, illustrated in image 5, conveys more implicit, indefinable, subtly differentiated emotions. This style, then, calls for a deeper interpretation of facial features, such as eye detail, head angle and facial proportions, together with bodily postures, stances and gestures, so that readers can ‘feel with’ the characters. The greater amount of detail makes meanings more intricate, rendering their harder interpretation more rewarding for the readers. Thus, the naturalistic style leads to a stronger emotional response in relation to themes, by sympathetically engaging with the characters as individuals: the character is no longer an archetype, but a distinct person (Welch, 2005 in Painter et al., 2013, p. 31).

In terms of the position of emotional solidarity that authors expect the audience to take up, the style of character drawing calls for different kinds of alignment. In other words, depiction style enables and encourages readers to ‘feel with’ the characters to varying degrees.

Second, ambience (Painter et al., 2013, p. 35), the system of choices in colour, allows for an immediate connection between readers and characters. Although colour obviously represents the appearance of things in the world –events and circumstances in the case of narratives (ideational meanings)–, it also has an emotional, interpersonal impact on the audience. This system includes choices of outline drawing and choices of colour and texture, both for the design of individual characters and the atmosphere of the story.

There might be images with no colour but texture, in which the use of light levels creates different effects. For example, more lighting effects create more dramatic images and less lighting effects, flatter images.

When the choice involves colour, three sub-systems have been further developed to capture more delicate choices. These sub-systems have to do with (i) how saturated colours are, (ii) how warm or cool they are, and (iii) how familiar or unfamiliar they are in reality and within a culture, and how comfortable or alienated they make readers feel. The options within these sub-systems work simultaneously to display different feelings that readers can empathise with. Authors express characters’ feelings not by choosing ‘starkly opposed choices’ but alternatives within clines (Painter et al., 2013, p. 36).

For instance, one cline ranges from vibrant, fully saturated images to muted images with low saturation. When colours are more vibrant, images generate a sense of excitement and vitality; when there is lower saturation, images create a gentler and more restrained feeling. This last option, in turn, can be made up of lighter shades (+white) or darker shades (+black). Lighter shades are related to feelings of calmness and quietness, while darker ones tend to express gloomier feelings such as loneliness, sadness and emptiness.

As we mentioned before, in some cases, this range between vibrant and muted images fits the plot of the story together with the characters’ feelings. In image 20, to characterise the couple’s close and loving relationship and render feelings of excitement and vitality, the colours are vibrant, warm and familiar. The emotions triggered by those colours become even more intense when contrasted with what can be seen through the window: a background of muted, cool and removed colours that suggest loneliness, detachment and even aloofness. Colour choices are at the service of both the plot and the emotions experienced by the characters.

Apart from interpersonal systems, there exist resources that make textual meanings that also add to the identification and understanding of emotion. The system of focus (Painter et al., 2013, p. 109) is one of these resources. This system is about the choices that illustrators can make when arranging the composition of pages in picture books. In other words, focus considers where an element is placed within the composition of the page. If an element is made centrifocal, that is, “placed in or balanced around a centre” (Painter et al., 2013, p. 111), the degree to which an element draws the readers’ attention is maximised.

For instance, in image 20 above, the couple is balanced around the centre and linked through physical and eye contact to form a single unit of visual information. Analysing other resources in the images helps us infer what kind of shared emotion this is.

4.1.1. In short: Creating emotion

We have shown how resources coming from the interpersonal systems of depiction style and ambience, together with the textual system of focus, work to create emotion in picture books. The choices regarding style of character drawing, colour and arrangement of elements in the image are key to triggering in readers an active responsive understanding of the feelings expressed by characters and the feelings suggested by the atmosphere of the story. Familiarity with these choices makes it possible for readers to explore feelings in a picture book more deeply and to interact with these aspects of the story more consciously, which in turn improves bimodal literacy and boosts the potential for personal production.

4.2. Calling for judgement

Authors also make use of certain resources so that readers adopt different attitudes towards characters and the way they behave. Judgement, as emotion, can be positive or negative. Positive judgement implies admiring or praising behaviour, while negative judgement entails criticising or condemning it. Judgements on people’s behaviour can be related to how special they are, how capable they are, how resolute they are, how truthful they are and how far beyond reproach they are (Martin & White, 2005, p. 52).

Certain words generally express these different areas of judgement, as illustrated in the tables below, adapted from Martin & White (2005, p. 53).

Table 4 – judgement (Adapted from Martin & White, 2005, p. 53).

In picture books, it is the combination of words and images that makes judgement more evident. To be able to fully interpret the meanings conveyed by images, the role of many visual resources should be borne in mind. Identifying and following characters throughout the narrative is the first step in achieving this. Very often the actions going on in the narrative, together with the circumstances that contextualise them, offer readers a chance to judge characters’ behaviour. Moreover, relying on acquired knowledge of the world helps interpret human conduct.

Recognising and tracking characters throughout the story in order to judge their actions indicates a focus on experiential (representational) meanings which are, in turn, working towards the higher interpersonal meaning of creating active responsive understanding in readers. Judging characters’ behaviour implies analysing a character at certain moments of the narrative, when particular and meaningful behaviours are displayed.

As sequences of images depict different stages of an action, characters can be tracked both verbally and visually through reference. While verbally the use of pronouns constructs the system of reference (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, p. 31) or identification (Martin, 1992, p. 93), visually, this system is built through the way characters –or their distinctive features– are manifested and repeated in subsequent images signifying a single constant identity. In images, these meanings are captured by the systems of character manifestation and character appearance proposed by Painter et al. (2013, p. 58). Characters may reappear in full or by showing only a salient feature of their bodies, a shadow or silhouette. Thus, though readers generally judge characters’ behaviour in a single image, they should bear in mind all the knowledge about characters expressed as the sequence of events unfolds.

As stated above, we judge behaviour by observing what characters do as the narrative moves forward (see also chapter 2 above). In verbal texts, characters’ actions are communicated in a more straightforward way by verbs (processes) themselves. When analysing visual narratives, however, the depiction of actions is not as transparent. It is the use of vectors and oblique lines that visually implies the presence of a narrative process. Narrative processes can be classified into action processes (Max chasing his dog in Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak [1963], for example, with his limbs functioning as vectors to signal movement), verbal processes (Max ordering the monsters to be still) and mental processes (Max longing to be with someone who loves him best). If the process has an effect on another character or object, the positive or negative nature of that effect generally helps readers judge the action itself as good or bad, right or wrong.

More narrative, dynamic images may contain secondary participants that function as circumstances: they could be left out without affecting the basic message of the story. However, circumstances are important inasmuch as they add information to what is going on (see also chapter 2 above). For instance, in image 3, the watering can the bunny uses in her giant carrot garden is not there just to build the material world the bunny lives in, but rather to help better understand the events in the story, as caring for her orchard is important to the bunny.

When dealing with judgement, circumstances of means become particularly revealing. This type of circumstance is represented by the tools used in action processes, and these processes are the ones that make character behaviour visually accessible to readers. In image 6, the circumstance of means, namely, the paintbrush, adds symbolic value, heightening the meanings expressed by the processes and helping readers critically judge the boy’s behaviour, as it points to the type of reprehensible actions he usually engages in.

Acquired knowledge of the world allows readers to assign these circumstances of means an important role when it comes to judging characters’ behaviour. We cannot understand the information our eyes provide “until we interpret [it] in the light of previous experience (…) not just personal associations but also cultural assumptions” (Nodelman, 1988, p. 8-9).

Keeping in mind that one event may relate to another in successive images both verbally and visually, comparison and contrast are some of the strategies deployed to make sense of the relations between events. The analysis of these relations may reveal patterns in the storyline. These patterns are regular arrangements of meanings that can help judge characters’ behaviour. Sometimes they confirm one another; others, they oppose one another, and yet some others, they filter experience through a character’s consciousness (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 293-294).

Images 23, 7 and 8 illustrate this point. In a story about a man who walks around the museum and enjoys art on his own, the first two images show positive dispositions that initially invite readers to align with the quiet joy of contemplating works of art. The third image breaks the sequence and may lead readers to judge the tourists’ actions in opposition to the man’s: his negative emotional reaction reflects his own negative judgement of their taking over the museum and thus invites us to criticise them as ignorant and condemn them as greedy.

The system of focus, which corresponds to textual meanings, offers other resources that can help us judge characters’ behaviour. As stated above, this system is about the arrangement of elements on the page. If the resources that call for judgement are placed in a centrifocal way on the page, it is easier for readers to recognise the behaviour of the character and judge it. This happens because such an arrangement of elements allows “us to attend exclusively to the single depicted participant or group without any potential distraction” (Painter et al., 2013, p. 113).

4.2.1. In short: Calling for judgement

We have shown how resources coming from the experiential and textual metafunctions work to trigger judgement from readers. Some of these resources belong to the systems of character manifestation and appearance. Looking at processes and vector arrangement becomes useful as well. There is no visual system for kinds of circumstances, yet we can look at images in terms of secondary participants and other elements accompanying the action carried out by the main characters. The patterns processes and circumstances create are crucial to either praising or condemning characters’ behaviour and to actively responding to them. Moreover, the arrangement of elements on the page should also inform our analysis and judgement of characters’ behaviour. Thus, readers are now able to move from the more personal realm of feelings to the more institutionalised area of judgement, which relies on moral principles about what is socially accepted or not.

4.3. Fostering appreciation

As we move from the area of more straightforward emotions into the realm of complex abstract assessment of entities and themes in a story, it becomes more difficult to pinpoint all the resources used to provoke the desired effect on the audience. The resources to prompt emotion and call for judgement are more easily available to readers because feelings and behaviour have observable manifestations, and, on the other hand, the expression of feelings and judgements is more closely connected to everyday life.

To take matters one step further, the patterns individual emotions and judgements create can be identified. These patterns may reveal different states of affairs and propositions about feelings and behaviours. However, appreciation implies more abstract reasoning, thorough knowledge of the world and broad cultural background. Appreciation implies what Hasan (Hasan, 1996a, p. 54) calls “higher levels of articulation,” in other words, “deeper hypotheses about the conditions of human existence,” which constitute the themes in a narrative.

Together with those for creating emotion and judging behaviour, there are resources that authors make use of to foster readers’ appreciation of concrete or abstract entities. Readers can appreciate things or ideas in terms of reaction: the impact things have on us (I found the story fascinating.) and the quality of these things (The idea was grotesque.). They can also appreciate composition: the balance (The painting was proportioned.) and complexity of things (The plot was too simplistic.). Lastly, readers can value the worth of things (It was an exceptional film!) (Martin & White, 2005, p. 56). This classification of verbal resources can be recontextualised for the analysis of images.

Appreciation implies a higher level of interpretation than that necessary when we look at emotion and judgement. Thus, we typically evaluate ideas –entities that are more abstract– once we have considered feelings and behaviours in the narrative. As appreciation is a step forward in the analysis of narratives, all the visual and verbal resources authors make use of for creating emotion and calling for judgement come into play when fostering appreciation. As with emotion and judgement, appreciation can be positive or negative.

In verbal narratives, mental processes (verbs), which mainly encode meanings of perceiving and knowing (Eggins, 2004, p. 225) help communicate the appreciation expressed by adjectives, as these verbs show how we perceive and how we know things. In picture books, however, it is difficult to identify these types of processes, since they correlate to inner activity that is hard to illustrate. Thought bubbles obviously represent characters’ projected thoughts and ideas about the world. For instance, in image 22, the fuzzy thought bubble (circular in shape but with spikes) enhances the worth the character assigns to his idea: it is a super idea. Thus, projected thoughts, which can be given even more strength with certain shapes or colours, can help readers to value the quality, complexity and worth of things. However, to transmit more complex processes that foster appreciation, the projection may illustrate a complete event or authors may resort to a strategic combination of text and image, in which gestures, postures and facial expressions are quite revealing.

Key ideas or important entities can be made salient to make it easier for readers to appreciate them. The systems of framing and focus are useful when detecting such salient elements. As discussed in chapter 3, the system of framing considers whether the image is framed or not, and, if framed, how framing is realised (Painter et al., 2013, p. 103). Elements which break through the edges of an image, for instance, are clearly prominent. In image 23 below, the spoon stirs the potion in the cauldron. The spoon breaches through the margin of the image, which makes it even more outstanding. As we said before, salience allows us to interpret the spoon as a symbolic attribute standing for a witch’s magic and power.

Besides, a very well-defined frame or, paradoxically, the absence of a depicted context within the frame in an image can also make elements salient. The purpose of choosing such resources is to highlight the importance of the element in the composition. This is the case of the spoon in image 24 below. This “magical spoon” stands alone against a white background with no frame at all, which makes it unequivocally salient.

In addition, authors resort to situations in their illustrations that have already been assigned cultural values in a given society, such as freedom, peace, love, repression, war and hatred, among others.

Thus, authors rely on the community of values readers have access to through their knowledge of the world.

For instance, in image 25 below, the polar bears in their natural habitat, contemplating the aurora borealis highlights the intrinsic connections within the natural world. Today, seeing a group of polar bears happily roaming through the snow immediately triggers the certainty that environmental concerns make that less of a reality and more of a dream every day. Anyone wondering in the Arctic would be hard pressed to find care-free bears enjoying the Northern lights, and that is exactly what makes this image powerful: the bears can appreciate the beauty of nature and feel closely connected to their surroundings and looking at them do so can help readers appreciate the importance of caring for the environment.

Clearly, then, our interpretation of values in images is enriched and sometimes determined by our shared knowledge of the world, since even though “a society, its cultures and the representation of their meanings, form a tightly integrated whole […], there are some highly general semiotic principles, which are common to all human communication” (Kress, 2010, p. 8). As with emotion and judgement, patterns of meaning also play a pivotal role in the analysis of appreciation. Patterns of repetition, contrast and transformation are mainly used as a resource to build the themes of the story (Macken-Horarik, 2003, p. 300).

As we said before, appreciation is the final stage in the process of creating active responsive understanding, which implies integrating the resources that express emotion and judgement in the process as well. For example, colour choice, which is generally associated with the expression of feelings, can also help us reinforce a theme, as in image 25 above, since in this case the lively colours outside the cage contrast with the cold palette of the cell.

4.3.1. In short: Fostering appreciation

After considering the choices regarding emotion and judgement, experiential and textual resources and their patterning can foster appreciation in readers. It is important to trace the typical stages readers go through as they move from responding to feelings, to judging behaviour, to valuing ideas because this process is crucial for facilitating literacy.

The use of thought bubbles to reinforce what characters think about the world, together with the way the images are framed and the elements within them grouped compositionally, help readers better understand and value the themes explored in the story. Analysing visual resources alone, however, is not enough to assess the underlying themes in a narrative –it is also knowledge of the world that guides and adds to the understanding of abstract ideas in a story.

4.4. A note on graduation

Even though we will not explore the applications of the system of graduation (Martin & White, 2005, p. 135) for the analysis of images in detail, we will introduce a few key concepts that can be extremely useful to understand and exploit the enhancement of meanings in images. graduation is a system in appraisal that can be used to scale up or scale down attitudinal meanings in language, according to intensity or amount (how much or how many of something there is) or to prototypicality and preciseness of category boundaries (how specific or how clear something is).

In images, graduation can be deployed to heighten the attitudinal impact of visual elements, so that the reader responds accordingly. The first scale, then, is the most practical for images, since it either amplifies or diminishes the impact of a depicted element by altering its size or extent (making it bigger or smaller in relation to other elements in the image or the space the element occupies within the frames of the image), multiplying or diminishing its number (more or fewer), or varying the intensity of its texture (making it brighter or duller).

For example, in image 3, the exaggerated size of the carrot helps us recognise and evaluate its importance for the bunny. Image 12 illustrates an old couple dancing at night, but the intensity of the colours has been dulled for this activity to be judged as peaceful and calm. In image 26, in turn, instead of displaying the character next to a single tree, there is a dense jungle enveloping him, which not only increases the importance of the setting for the story but also hints at the direction of the plot henceforth, considering the darkness of the jungle and the creatures that might be lurking within its vastness.

As can be seen from this brief explanation, Painter et al.’s words ring true: “quantification choices can play an important role in ensuring an attitudinal response in the reader, often working together with other interpersonal choices” (2013, p. 45).

4.5. Coda

In this chapter, we analysed how meanings of emotion, judgement and appreciation are expressed through visual and verbal choices in picture books to trigger certain responses in readers. This response moves gradually from more primeval emotional reactions, to morally-defined judgements, to culturally-determined appreciations of abstract themes.

As stated above, active responsive understanding can be thought of as a continuum, going from more personal responses to feelings, to more institutionalised judgements of behaviour, to deeper appreciation of abstract themes in the narrative. It is important to be aware of these stages, since the continuum reflects the process of reading comprehension and is therefore extremely useful for promoting children’s literacy. Exploring visual semiosis in the narrative structure of picture books, then, has important implications in the EFL classroom. Not only does this mean providing tools to understanding interpersonal meanings in picture books, but it also opens the possibility for students to create patterns of verbal and visual resources in similar contexts.

4.6. Resources in action

To further illustrate the resources explored in this chapter, we will include a brief analysis of the picture story book Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa, by Jeanette Winter (2008). This is the story of a girl called Wangari, who lives in Kenya surrounded by the beauty of nature. She helps harvest the produce of the rich soil of Africa and wins a scholarship to study in America. When she returns six years later, she witnesses a terrible change in her native country: the land is barren where crops once grew; “thousands of trees have been cut down to make room for buildings, but no one planted new trees to take their place” (p. 7). Heart-broken yet determined, Wangari starts planting seedlings to make a tree nursery. With the help of the village women, Wangari plants the “seeds of hope” (p. 10). Government men laugh at their efforts; however, they endure and eventually their ideals spread: other women start planting trees throughout Kenya. “But the cutting continues” (p. 17). When Wangari tries to protect the trees by preventing the government men from chopping them, she is put in jail, accused of being a troublemaker. Still, her spirit does not break –and outside, her principles live on. Millions of women carry on with Wangari’s task until green returns to Kenya. “The whole world hears about Wangari’s trees and of her army of women who planted them” (p. 26).

The first thing to note in this powerful picture book is the change of the colours in the margins that help divide the story in stages. Gentle gold frames Wangari’s childhood, which is the colour of the birds, the thatched rooftops of African houses and the sun. Desolate dusty rose colours her return, mirroring the barren land, the sky without trees she finds back home. Hopeful light green accompanies the beginning of the planting, which makes the women and their trees look “like a green belt stretching over the land” (p. 12). The sorrowful blue-grey that matches the axes and buildings comes as the cutting continues and Wangari is put in jail. Finally, reassuring aqua takes over the background as Kenya gradually returns to green, soils are no longer barren and the skies clear, the women walk tall, and, after their own and their trees’ growth, normalcy is restored.

Another important consideration is that the illustrations in this picture book adopt the generic style of character drawing (depiction style). Because of that, there is a wide emotional repertoire to analyse that includes ‘behavioural’ emotions associated with watching, doing and concentrating. This style also facilitates empathy, as it allows readers to place themselves in the characters’ shoes.

This picture book is extremely rich in terms of the expression of emotion, judgement and appreciation. We will explore some instances of these expressions in particular moments of the story.

On the first page, we observe the presentation of the main character, Wangari, within a clear setting in place. Wangari stands in the middle of the image (focus) looking at us (focalisation), the generic style of character drawing is perfect to transmit a wide array of emotions in a simple, easy-to-align-to way (depiction style). When we see Wangari in this setting, smiling placidly among the pastel colours (ambience), we feel as comfortable and as deeply connected with nature as she does, which is, in turn, reflected in the choice of words: “Wangari lives under an umbrella of green trees in the shadow of Mount Kenya in Africa” (p. 1).

The second page presents a good example of character manifestation, whereby we recognise Wangari by the dress she wears. Unlike the previous image, the one on this page is dynamic and shows characters in action, more specifically, working. This brings to mind adjectives we can attribute to their particular behaviour: hardworking, vigorous, productive, competent, tireless, resolute –all of which signal that, based on their actions, we can judge the characters in terms of social esteem and thus praise their capacity and tenacity. If we analyse Wangari’s facial features (depiction style), we can recognise pride and admiration for her mother, a role model whose steps she is literally following. This suggests that we will encounter other situations that will be judged similarly later on, as Wangari seems likely to emulate her mother. At the same time, the composition of the image suggests interconnectivity of nature, which, as in the previous image, reflects Wangari’s happiness.

The fourth page presents a conceptual image that acts as a hinge with the next section. We can judge Wangari’s behaviour (travelling and studying) as adventurous, in terms of her tenacity and capacity. Furthermore, there is a clear colour contrast (ambience) between the brown and green of the country she leaves behind, full of trees and lively animals, and the grey of the one where she goes, crammed with buildings. In a way, this juxtaposition foreshadows the plights Wangari will face later in the story.

With the fifth page comes the first colour change in the margins (ambience). There is also a marked contrast between the green of Wangari’s clothes, which somehow takes us back to the old green Kenya, and the dismal dusty rose setting (ambience). Wangari’s arms serve as vectors to highlight her emotions when confronted with this overwhelming reality: astonishment, sadness and confusion.

While the image on page seven focuses on Wangari’s thoughts and the one on page eight on her own actions, the one on page nine broadens the scope. Compositionally, more space is taken up by the trees than by Wangari herself (graduation), which symbolises that her endeavour, as it spreads, becomes bigger than herself. On the tenth page this is elaborated on. We see Wangari passing on her ideals and commitment to other women. Eye contact between the characters points at their shared commitment and shared emotions. Judgement can also be analysed here because action is central to the image. Wangari’s behaviour is such that we can judge it from the point of view of propriety, thereby moving from social esteem to social sanction.

The images on the eleventh and twelfth pages introduce another change in margin colour (ambience), which coincides with a movement in the plot. At the same time, the great number of women becomes highly significant (graduation): they are so many that emotion seems more intense, and it is easier to identify the behaviour to be judged.

In the images on pages fifteen and sixteen, graduation accompanies the plot. We see other cities and other villages following Wangari’s example. While the type of buildings marks these places as distinct, the shared action of planting creates unity. As readers, we are invited to judge the planting positively and to appreciate the theme of reconnecting with nature and rebuilding the environment.

The seventeenth page brings about another change in margin colour (ambience) as the plot approaches the main conflict and the story is reaching its climax. graduation plays an important role here to increase the impact of the cut-down trees. Apart from the action itself, which is in the centre (focus) and invites negative judgement, the axe as a circumstance of means contributes to the readers’ condemnation of the behaviour of the government men as insensitive, cruel and greedy.

On the twentieth page, the image shows a tiny window through which nature can be seen in the distance as the walls of the jail take over the illustration. The prison walls are the same shade as the margins (ambience), placing Wangari right in the middle of the odds that are against her. Even so, there are cracks on the wall that stand for the metaphoric crack in the society, where there is no place for Wangari’s green dream. We cannot see Wangari’s face, but we can notice she is bleeding and seems to be hiding her emotions while keeping her focus on the outside. Convinced of the righteousness of her actions, Wangari thinks that “right is right, even if you’re alone” (p. 20). This quoted thought works in tandem with the image, so that our instincts to judge Wangari’s behaviour as laudable increase.

Page twenty-six presents an image leaning towards the moral of the story. We do not see action here, but rather the representation of a value for us to appreciate. Wangari teaches us that sacrifice yields, pays, rewards. The number of trees show her wide-reaching impact while Wangari’s size highlights the importance of her commitment (graduation). At the same time, the focus on her overlaying the whole world, gives her valuable behaviour a tinge of universality.

The images on pages twenty-seven and twenty-eight constitute a spread and magnify the importance of nature itself rather than the people involved. The emphasis on nature is evident in the extensive use of green (graduation & ambience) and in the use of the sapling as a symbol of hope for the future of Africa. In the text, this is mirrored by the allusions to the green of trees bringing a new lease of life.

The illustrations are so rich that we could certainly go even deeper into the analysis of the images in Wangari’s Trees of Peace. The exploration here has been kept to the resources pertaining to this chapter in particular, plus a few exceptions where a choice belonging to a system discussed elsewhere (focalisation, chapter 3) became especially meaningful. Thus, even though many meaningful choices related to other macro meanings have not been delved into, we can confidently say that Winter’s picture story book is a fantastic publication to exemplify active responsive understanding.