4/24/2023 0 Comments Drawn together![]() The next page is also textless as it provides a close, aerial view of grandson and grandfather sitting down to foods signifying their cultural differences. In fact, the first spread is a text-free depiction of the boy entering his grandfather’s home (after his mother drops him off, dejected, on front-matter pages). ![]() In the book proper, the restraint of Lê’s spare writing surpasses the cleverness evidenced by the title to allow Santat’s full creative powers to engage with the story. Of course, many picture books do this but Lê and Santat’s overt theme of connection through art-making underscores how their collaboration invites readers to connect with each other through art meaning-making. Clever, right? But this picture book’s brilliance resides in how its interdependent verbal and visual layers of meaning can draw readers together, too. The lettering’s striking appearance on the jacket also arrests attention on Lê’s title itself, prompting consideration of its dual meanings: the characters draw together and in doing so are emotionally drawn together. ![]() Lastly, for design reasons, I modified certain characters for legibility.” This typographic, cultural melding is a first indication of Santat’s achievement of “excellence of pictorial interpretation of story, theme, or concept” as it offers an immediate, visual representation of the connection forged by the story’s English-speaking boy and his Thai-speaking grandfather when they transcend language barriers through collaborative art-making. Then I integrated Western alphabet components into the design to show a melding of cultures. I was instantly intrigued when illustrator Dan Santat described on social media how he developed the display type for Drawn Together, writing, “It originates from the original Thai alphabet.
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