Tag Archives: school visit

All About Illustration with Charter Oak

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Students learn how to balance a composition with characters from The Simples Love a Picnic.

Students learn how to balance a composition with characters from The Simples Love a Picnic.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of visiting the first graders of Charter Oak Elementary School and talking to them about illustration.  This is one of my favorite presentations to do because I love art and illustration so much and first graders are the perfect audience for this topic.  They see illustration every day.  My talk just sheds a little more light on why certain styles are picked for certain texts, how I do picture books layouts, and we practice how to compose an illustration with some cut outs from The Simples Love a Picnic, Snow White, and nursery rhymes.  It’s a lot of fun!

Simple Fun at Whiting Lane

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SimplesSpokesmodels
I kicked off the week with a two-day visit to Whiting Lane School where I had big fun doing my new presentation, ALL ABOUT ILLUSTRATION, with the kids.  I read my new book THE SIMPLES LOVE A PICNIC and talked about how I illustrate a book from choosing a style, to character consistency, to planning a layout, to composing a scene.  (Below) Some student illustrators help me compose a nice picnic spread with The Simples.

SimplesIllustrationCouple
Then I retired to the library where the fabulous Lee Gluck let me take over and do fun, crazy ant collages with the students.  I find the best art projects have a little bit of me teaching a technique and a little bit of the kids taking over and making their own choices.  Here we have ants carrying an orange, a carrot, a slice of watermelon, and a donut.  I love it!

ANTS
Thanks so much to Lee Gluck and the fabulous teachers and student at Whiting Lane for making me feel so welcome!  I love you guys!