Creative Coaching at Central Normal School Day 5 & 6

Today we started working on the storyboards, working out what pictures they’d put to go with their words. We talked about making another layer of story on top of the words, rather than just repeating what they’d written, and about trying to bring out little funny simple things into the picture. Tracye gave a good modelling demonstration of how to simplify a character – for non-professional illustrators it can be a bit daunting trying to reproduce an animal and make it look cute. She showed them a fox for an example, using really simple lines and taking the essential parts of what makes it look like a fox – the skinny long face, bushy tail, dainty limbs – she used stick limbs for those. By adding a bow she could make it look like a girl, and adding curly eyelashes it made it a really girly-girl. The tendency with the kids was to clutter the page with a whole lot of detail, and we had a bit of trouble getting across to them that we just wanted basic shapes and ideas – I think they wanted it to look like a finished product. So we talked about camera angles, and what the space on the page looks like e.g. close-ups, mid-shots, aerial angles (we used Philip’s roughs from the Camping Holiday as an example). We also looked at using other methods than drawing things – things like a night time scene where the character was leaving a room, just having a black page with two eyes, and a door with an exit sign. (or a crack of light around the door). We talked about mechanisms (this is Tracye dictating here, I don’t know all this teacher-speak, but I’ll look it up later in an educational dictionary) such as pop-ups, flaps and even using envelopes with extra information inside like an advertisement. Talking together without the kids after the class, we almost want to give them a medium to work in, like Eric Carle with tissue paper. We are fairly desperate to get them to stick to simple shapes, so that they are recognisable. By the end of tomorrow’s session we’d like them to have finished their storyboards, but some of them will have to start again with a more simplified approach. We need to go back to their characters and make sure they can be reproduced from different angles, and this can only be done using simple lines. We’re going to bring in some books to show them tomorrow – Meg and Mog, a collection of Eric Carle, the Spot books – anything that uses easily-reproduced shapes.

Diana Neild and Tracye Katon