My metaphor of the year is The Frame. It’s turning up everywhere. Life experiences keep giving me insights that point to the lesson that it’s all about framing. An example: Recently, returning from a school presentation trip to St. Louis, I got bumped with several other passengers when our flight out of Dulles Airport was oversold. One gentleman, en route to a business meeting that night, expressed his outrage that his schedule could be disrupted when he had a confirmed reservation (but alas, no seat assignment).

I was certainly inconvenienced as well. The later flight would put me in Portland, Maine, too late to take the last ferry to the island I live on. I was tired and eager to get home from a five-day trip, to see my husband and my cat, and to get back to my work, including illustrations on a deadline. But I decided to just relax and accept the airline’s offer of a room at the airport Hilton, a seat on the first flight in the morning, and a voucher for a free ticket.

I’m certain that my fellow passenger and I had completely different experiences of getting bumped. In the context of his work needs and his expectations of the airline, the businessman encountered a disaster. With the luxury of a more flexible schedule, I chose a mini-vacation.

Our perception and, therefore, our experience of reality is determined by how we hold – or frame – what happens to us. “The trick is what one emphasizes,” Carlos Castaneda wrote. “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.” I was inspired recently by a piece in my college alumnae magazine about Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. In a visit to campus, Parks shared a memory of starting out in the late 1980’s, on opening night of her first production in New York City, performed in a corner of a tiny neighborhood bar, with five people in the audience, three of whom were her parents and the bartender. “Parks tells the story as a dream fulfilled,” the article reported. “’I had a show in New York,’ she said. ‘I had arrived.’” The story Parks told herself made her a success in her own eyes and empowered her as an artist.

“Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world,” George Lakoff says in his book about framing, DON'T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT, in which he brilliantly applies the concept to political discourse. The title of the book is itself a framing exercise. The statement, “don’t think of an elephant,” causes you to do exactly that. The speaker has seized control of, or framed, the exchange, making you see what they want you to.

Another layer of my recent learnings concerns not the metaphorical but the literal frame. On the St. Louis trip, my presentations included a “Composing Comics” workshop given to groups of middle school students, sharing the process of creating my graphic novel, The Legend of Hong Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea. Though I’ve been exploring comics for three years now, the experience of articulating to adolescents the power of the frame caused me to see it myself at a new level. I was able to step back and get a clearer picture of what it was that I and other artists using the comics format were doing.

“If you remember one thing from this workshop,” I told the students, “I want you to get the power of this.” In red marker I outlined a square I’d drawn in black to represent a comics panel. “In making comics, your job is to use the frame to guide the reader’s eye to see what you want them to see.”

I suggested that the students think of the frame as a movie camera view finder and imagine the movie they wanted to film of a particular scene. From what angle and perspective do you want to portray the scene – front, side, from below or bird’s eye view? Far away or close-up? What details do you want readers to focus on? I demonstrated with rough sketches ways of developing character or setting or plot by moving the frame, such as zooming in on characters’ faces to show emotional expression.

I know I make intuitive decisions like these when I plan picture book illustrations. But before comics, many of my images were similarly framed, as if I were in a theater watching the story I was illustrating being acted on stage. For variety, I might move a little closer or take a seat on the other side of the theater, but all the pictures had the same basic frame – the stage proscenium. Then comics released me from the limitations of the theater and put me on a movie set.

I’m currently illustrating the seventh in a picture book series by Juanita Havill about a little girl named Jamaica, the first of which was published in 1986. I just met with the designer and the art director to review my rough dummy. They noticed that, compared to the previous Jamaica books, I was using more variety in the angles and perspectives of my pictures.

Without even being aware of it, I’m making bolder and more varied choices. And I hope to go farther in this direction. Listening to what I was saying to the middle school students, I realized I could become even more conscious of the edges of the picture book page as a frame. As an illustrator, it is my job to direct the reader’s eye and the experience of the story. The power of the frame is in my hands.

Published in newsletter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators.
(Reproduced with permission.)