The one thing I found most surprising and interesting when discussing illustration through history is the different mediums used. I never thought about different mediums of books and illustrations ever being a thing but, after researching with my group, I found the illustrations of the book we were looking at were wood carvings. I thought that was really cool. I, personally, never paid much attention to illustrations in a book I was reading unless the illustrations were relevant to the story (like a graphic novel or, when I was a kid, the geronimo stilton books). I never really read many books with illustrations to begin with or I just wouldn't notice them. The discissions about illustrations during class did remind me of another course I took on Children's Literature, though. It reminded me of when we discussed, in that class, the relationship between texts and their illustrations and how the illustrations can enhance the text, contradict the text, or be a visual representation of exactly what the text says.

Text and image can go together to enhance each other in many ways to help us, the reader with our interpretations. We saw that in the class discussion when we were shown the picture of the eclipse and then the picture of Sherlock Holmes. I was originally confused upon seeing the picture of the sun and moon, I originally thought it had something to do with folklore. Especially with their faces I first thought of the sun god and moon goddess but then I saw the text and saw that it was an image of a solar eclipse. Same with the picture of Sherlock. I thought his hat looked like some soldiers and I thought it was someone crawling in the trenches, I didn't pay much attention to the background but when I saw it was more like a tree and I paid attention to what he was wearing, it looked like a man searching the ground for something. It wasn't until more context was brought that I realized what it actually was. So we can already see a difference in how quickly we are to understand what something is especially from a small illustration with words and text to help enhance the picture.