A Typical School Day

I now use a digital projector for my school presentations. It's a great way of sharing picture books with a large audience as it allows children at the back of the room to see the illustrations in the same detail they'd see if the book was in their laps. I have my own high definition projector and laptop but I need a suitable room with a screen, whiteboard or large area of clear wall to project onto, preferably one where the lights can be turned off and the curtains/blinds drawn.

Once set up, I prefer to stay in one place, which also maximises the time spent talking to the children. The school hall (if it has one) is usually ideal, but I accept that it may be necessary to do the last morning session elsewhere to prepare the hall for dinner.

Here’s a how a typical school day might be programmed.

Assemblies

An assembly at the beginning of the day is a good way of introducing me to all of the children.

She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain Assembly (30 minutes)

This is an excellent icebreaker and works well with both infants and juniors.  A short introduction and reading of my picture book She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain is followed by an audience participation version featuring The Cowgirl Hat of Compulsory Silliness. The session requires 8 volunteer pupils who respond well to instructions and don’t mind doing silly things in front to the other children.  I usually use at least one child from each class, selected by their teacher.  It speeds things up if volunteers are selected in advance.

This assembly can be extended by including an Ask the Author session (see below) at the end.

Reading and Ask the Author Assembly (30 minutes)

After introducing myself and reading from one of my picture books I conduct a question and answer session.  Although I take questions throughout the day, one of the advantages of doing a Q & A in assembly at the beginning of the day is that it allows me to address some of the more oft-repeated questions, such as “Where do you get your ideas from?”, in front of everyone, leaving me free to answer more specific questions, such as “Where did you get the idea for a particular book?” later in the day.

These sessions always work best when the children have thought about their questions in advance and can be further improved by the children writing their questions on my Ask the Author sheets , which you can get from the downloads page.  If you use the sheets, then 20 or so questions can be selected by the school in advance and stuck up on a notice board for me to choose from.  This allows teachers a degree of editorial control over the questions asked and allows me to select the ones that I know will have the most interesting or entertaining answers.  Bear in mind that questions don’t have to be about being an author - a few light-hearted questions, such as “If you had to be a fruit, what fruit would you be?”*, help to lighten the tone.

As well as the child’s name, the Ask the Author sheet has a space for the child to draw a self-portrait, which I attempt to identify them from, before addressing my answer to them.

* In case you’re wondering, the answer is a kumquat.

Workshops

Junior Year 5 & 6 Picture Book Illustration Workshop (All Day)

This is an all day workshop suitable for a class of no more than 30 children.

The children are presented with a picture book text, for which they will provide the illustrated pages. I use texts for picture books that are still in production or have only just been published, to avoid the children having any preconceptions about how the finished book should look. At the end of the day, I show the children the illustrator's roughs or final artwork (if available) for the book.

After reading the text to the children, we discuss how the characters should look, based on what we know or can deduce from the text and subjective interpretation.  The children then prepare their own character sketches, before moving on to explore the principles of picture book design and eventually to prepare final spreads and cover art. Each child prepares a single spread for the book and I make up a selection of these into a unique edition for the school to keep.

This workshop works best when the children already have some experience in basic figure drawing, such as breaking the figure down into simple shapes like an oval for a head, a rectangle for a torso etc. and getting the right relative proportions for each (see illustration opposite). If the children are unfamiliar with this, I usually have to spend a great deal of time addressing it before the children are able to progress beyond the initial character sketch stage of the workshop. If the children have spent a little time practicing drawing simple outlines figures in different poses it allows me to keep the workshop focused on the intended topics of illustration and book design. 

Pop-up Workshops?

Although I’m happy to talk to children about designing pop-up books, I’m less comfortable doing workshops in which children make their own pop-ups.  Although I have agreed to do these on a couple of occasions, the experience has made me wary of offering such workshops in the future.

I can’t see the point in offering a prescriptive workshop, with every child making an identical pop-up, as I think a teacher could run this as well as I could*, but I’ve found that as soon as I introduce a tiny element of customisation into the simplest mechanism, most children (and indeed many teachers) struggle to get their head around it.  This problem can be overcome with one-to-one tuition, but on the last occasion that I did a workshop, there was far too many children and far too little time and I had to end the session with a room full of mostly incomplete pop-ups and an overwhelming sense of frustration and disappointment.  If I were to attempt another workshop, I’d want it to be with no more than 30 children from Year 5 or 6 and for a full day.

* You can download some pop-up designs from this page if you want to give this a try.