Colour Blocked: Printing in See and Say

Antonio Frasconi’s quadrilingual See and Say gives its readers a lesson in basic vocabulary words in English, Italian, French, and Spanish. Its illustrations, therefore, need to be simple and immediately recognizable as signs for what the words they correspond to mean. Frasconi delivers on this need by rendering the signs in woodblock printed art that is simple yet stylistically engaging to view.

  Using the page that displays a barnyard scene, a reader can extrapolate how Frasconi created his printing. There are only four ink colors present: yellow, pink, blue, and black, and all the colors in the book are created by layering these in printing. For example, the ear of corn located at top verso was made in three stages. The detail of the husk and the shadows between kernels is printed in blue, then a yellow overlay renders the detail green, and adds color to the kernels and adds cornsilk. A small black dot atop the stalk is the final step. These colors are also present alone on the page in various places, but their use together creates full, complex images that are still clearly discernible.

While the images themselves are simple objects, corn, a cow, a girl, a hand, a barn, and are rendered in simple colours, they feel rich and detailed because of the texture and organic quality woodblock printing gives them. This texture is particularly evident in the body of the cow bottom verso, as it is printed in black. This allows the reader to see the wood grain present in the block used for printing. The grain leaves white spaces and lines within the black ink, a natural variety that creates visual interest to contrast the simple image. On the other hand, and indeed on bottom recto, the complex barn scene that has been painstakingly carved in detail shows very little of this organic texture, and instead showcases the artistry of the printer.

The artistry through which See and Say’s images are created shows a variety of different styles and complexities that can be achieved with woodcut printing, as well as how color can be layered to create new colors in the printing process. The manner in which its simple signs are rendered contributes to the efficacy of the book in its mission to be an easily grasped vocabulary primer.

Works Cited

Frasconi, Antonio. See and Say. Dover 1955.

Stats: CIP Fall 2022, Laramie Hearn. Installment #1: Artistry. 385 words.