Starting on my first draft.....

Essay Title: Discuss the Ways in which the Illustrations within Children's Picture Books have been used as Ideological Tools.

I really struggled to write my essay plan. I kept getting sidetracked and delving into philosophy. My tutor had to remind me that I was writing about illustrations and told me to realign all my thoughts. This really helped.


I then sat down and tried to write an introduction that would really help me pin point what I wanted to say. In school my English teacher told me that writing things in a top heavy pyramid, always works best for articles and essays. It is a general rule that I try to adhere to. Very few people get past the first section of your writing so you should ideally put all your main points into an introduction. Then the rest of the essay becomes a way of resolving all you touched upon in the introduction.


Writing the introduction in this way helped me knock out my essay plan. I spent a fair amount of time deciding on what children's picture books I wanted to discuss and then paired them up for discussion.


While doing my research I created a Word Document where I either copy pasted or typed up sections of what I was reading. I would put them down with the page numbers and the Harvard Reference with it. This has made writing the essay a lot easier. I just need to scan this document for all the citations and quotations and then choose to write them in my own words or quote them directly.


When I began, I realised very quickly that I had chosen a fairly ambitious topic. At some point I thought "Every children's picture book has an ideological stand point" It just felt like too much. I had to really think about what I wanted to focus on.

Fig.1

Fig.2

I have finished Chapter 1: How Picture Books are Viewed by the Intended Audience.


This chapter was easy to write, because of the prep work I had already done. I am in the middle of :


Chapter 2: Implicit Ideology in the original Noddy illustrations compared to Concealment of Communist Ideology in the Rainbow Fish illustrations.


I have slowed down considerably and realise that will need to edit this chapter once I finish it. It feels like I might be trying to say too much. I have placed two of the illustrations I am discussing here. These were done by Eelco Martinus ten Harmsen van der Beek. The second one has been compared to Mary Cooper's altered illustrations from the 1990 edition.
I began my second chapter by discussing the implicit ideology in the original Noddy series. It is interesting to note that even after the illustrations were altered by Mary Cooper for the 1990 edition, so much of the ideology of a white supremacist and chauvinistic world remained. As an illustrator it made me really reflect on those deep rooted messages that alter the connotations of an image. It is an act of tokenism to just replace a character when the entire set of illustrations hold such strong visual messages.