Lon Po Po - a Red-Riding Hood Story

Lon Po Po is a Red-Riding Hood story from China. It is illustrated by Ed Young. The illustrations in this book were painted in the impressionist style. Mr. Young uses color, scale and dimension, and composition to add to the optical effect the book has on the reader.

The colors in Lon Po Po invoke emotions. For example, the wolf and his shadow are black. Black is typically used to depict evil. Most if the illustrations in the book have a mixture of blues and greens. These colors are supposed to represent calm, quiet, and peaceful feelings. The girls in the story do remain calm; however, the activity of the wolf is a bit frightening.

Ed Young also uses scale and dimension to emphasize the plot of the story. Visual scale deals with the proximity of objects in an image. The illustration of the girls in the tree is a great example of this. The girls at the top are drawn larger than the wolf in the bottom of the picture. "This gives the perception of distance," (Anderson, 2006). The reader also feels as though the girls must maintain this distance in order to survive. Mr. Young also uses dimension in his illustrations. Dimension uses shading to show shadows and make a flat object appear to have depth. We can see examples of this on the girls' faces.

We also see many examples of composition in the illustrations. Composition is "the combination and arrangement of the elements," (Anderson, 2006) in an illustration. One important aspect of composition is point of view. We see this in the picture of the girls in the tree as well; it shows us their perspective. We see that the girls are high up in the tree with the wolf far below. Point of view is so important because illustrations of the story's plot can take on different meanings depending on which point of view they are drawn from. Different aged readers can interpret the images differently as well.

Ed Young's use of the impressionist style of illustrating has achieved an appealing picture for the reader. "The impressionist style uses interplay of color and light created with splashes, speckles, or dots of paint to create a dreamlike effect". (Anderson, 2006) The illustrations in this book display the activity if the story accurately, but they do not give away the story. By looking at the pictures first the reader is drawn to read the text to find out what is happening in the story.

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