Adapting drawings that emphasize on stories with visuals that resembles children‟s drawing make these picture books more suitable to their target audience.
analyze how present day illustrators managed to adapt this distinctive visual language and how to read their drawings using children‟s visual language, by looking through their works.
Children love to draw. And by looking to their drawings, we could see that somehow the children‟s drawings are different than the adults. By their intuition, somehow they manage to invent various methods which are unique. They do not emphasize on the aesthetics value of their drawing, but more on the communication aspect.
Even though children‟s drawing would not fit the aesthetics values judged by adults, the drawing itself is full of stories. Through 1207 their drawing, they would naturally emphasize on how to deliver stories to others. Primadi Tabrani, professor from ITB, Indonesia, described this phenomenon as children‟s visual language. This creates a unique method of telling stories visually which is could be applied by adults as well.
According to Tabrani, the way children see and draw is related with their development and integration of senses, imagination, nerves and reflexes, and the way of thinking. When they are drawing, intuitively the children would integrate their emotion, experiment, expression and creation,
They do not only draw what they see, but as a result of collaboration between all of their senses, thoughts and imagination that is expressed through the drawing. The process of drawing is more important than the drawing itself [3]. Therefore, children‟s drawing is not merely to capture scenery but it also captures the mood, the story and the children‟s expression within.
Children‟s drawing along with pre-historic primitive painting, traditional drawing and avant-garde artists stands within the Space-Time-Plane (STP) [4]. The STP system is a visual system that could represent multiple angles, multiple distances and multiple moments within one picture. It captures not only what is being drawn as one still picture but as a sequence which consists of several scenes that moves in the time and space. The picture became a sequence since it had a time dimension and can consist of several scenes. Therefore, it does not only describe what images of what objects are drawn but it can tell a story and an expression, it becomes a visual language, just like word language [5]. The STP system is different with the other system what Tabrani called Naturalistic-PerspectiveMoment opname (NPM). The NPM System works like a camera, introduced by Western domination and the accelerated process of globalization [6]. It captures nature as it is, drawn from one particular angle, one particular distance and one particular time, producing a descriptive picture in one, single scene [7]
(see Figure 1). Figure 1. Drawings using the STP System (left) and NPM System (right). Note that in the picture on the left, that in one drawing; it does not only represent the scenery of a house and its environment but also what is inside the house as well. Source: Tabrani (1993); Ahmad (2006)
Since the children‟s drawing used the STP system, to read the message within we could use the vocabulary of the STP system which related to the way to draw a picture. Tabrani called the way to draw a picture as Image Way [8]. There are many modes in Image Way, which several of them are:
1. The layering image: an image in the background layer happens earlier, while an image in the foreground layer happens later. In each layer, every image has a chronological time and place according to „the way to see‟ the picture.
2. Multiple objects to represent sequence: in each layer, an object can be drawn more than once. If an object is drawn with dynamic and expressive contour, this means that the object is a moving object and the picture describes its movement in sequence.
3. Size to describe the role of an object: If an object is important, then it will be drawn bigger than the surrounding.
4. Characteristic view: if an object is important to be recognize, than it will be drawn from the most characteristic view.
5. The X-ray view: if an important object is placed inside another object, then the outer object would be drawn as a transparent one.
6. Dream time: a mixing of various scenes from different time and space in one scene in order to tell the story related to all of them. It can happen anytime, everywhere.
7. Outer space: objects are drawn as seem they are flying in the sky in various positions, even upside down.
Since the children have their own unique way in telling stories, so when we create medium for them it is safe to use their own language as the main method of communication.
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