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In picture books, metaphor can be expressed through the text, through the image or through both. The first way develops verbal metaphors while the other two create pictorial metaphors. According to Doonan in Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, images have two basic modes of external reference: denotation and exemplification. Drawing on her conception of exemplification as a means to express abstract notions, conditions or ideas, this article contends that moods, eccentric ideas or philosophical reflections can be metaphorically displayed in images, and that the processes involved work at different levels of meaning. Three picture books were selected for this purpose: The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean; Rules of Summer, by Shaun Tan; and The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick. In each one, images or sequences are analyzed, following Painter's, Martin's and Unsworth's systemic-functional approach to visual narratives in Reading Visual Narratives. This shows that the processes involved in metaphorical display work at different levels of meaning, rooted in Halliday's metafunctions of language, and that they all contribute to revealing the underlying metaphor. Whereas McKean's pictorial processes allow him to evoke the complex mood of the main character, Tan's images interact with the text to suggest metaphorical interpretations of conflictual conceptions of the world, and Selznick's specific type of relationship between text and image offers him the opportunity to develop a cinematographic metaphor throughout his narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]