Inbal Leitner is a professional Illustrator with over 20 years’ experience working within the Illustration and Animation industry. After working on many editorial illustration, and animation projects, Inbal specialised in Children’s Book Illustration and completed a Masters at Cambridge School of Art in 2018. In this second post from a series of two about illustrating poetry, Inbal encourages stepping out of the sketchbook to create a mini illustrated poem for your own eyes only.
Images can tell a story even without words. A sequence of images helps us understand what happened before and what will happen later.
Read the poem again and choose a line or few lines that describe a situation, something that happens. Can you respond to those lines?
You may want to draw what the lines say or you may be inspired by the poem to draw/paint/create something else in response to the lines you chose.
Composition: Stepping out of the Sketchbook
We can present our images in different ways.
To do that, you need to remember one important thing: Pages don’t need to stay in one piece! You can cut out windows and holes, you can add flaps, stick shapes, plants, people, animals, buildings – anything!
Let’s try and step out of the sketchbook –
Take a few pieces of paper, fold and cut them in different ways, so that unfolding them will be fun and interesting. Yon can try concertina, gate fold, “snail” fold or any types of folds!
Let’s see if we can make the folded papers into mini-books!
Can you fit one of the images you created previously into your folded papers? Where would you paint/Draw it? In the beginning? The middle? The end of your mini folding book?
Once you’ve placed your image, think of additional images that can be placed before or after your image. Go back to shape and line drawings and see if you can come up with a small sequence of images that tell the story of the poem or a story inspired by the poem.
Unfold the paper and read your mini story with your eyes only, now unfold it while reading the poem aloud. Does it work? If you would like to change anything, you can always try another mini book or cut out the parts you less like and replace them with newly painted/drawn parts.
There are endless ways to tell stories, you can always go back to your sketchbook, add ideas, explore and invent new ways of storytelling.
Enjoy the Making!
This is a sample of a resource created by UK Charity AccessArt. We have over 850 resources to help develop and inspire your creative thinking, practice and teaching.
AccessArt welcomes artists, educators, teachers and parents both in the UK and overseas.
We believe everyone has the right to be creative and by working together and sharing ideas we can enable everyone to reach their creative potential.
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A collection of imagery and sources which you can use to prompt drawing in schools and community groups.
Please note that this page contains links to external websites and has videos from external websites embedded. At the time of creating, AccessArt checked all links to ensure content is appropriate for teachers to access. However external websites and videos are updated and that is beyond our control.
Please let us know if you find a 404 link, or if you feel content is no longer appropriate.
We strongly recommend as part of good teaching practice that teachers watch all videos and visit all websites before sharing with a class. On occasion there may be elements of a video you would prefer not to show to your class and it is the teacher’s responsibility to ensure content is appropriate. Many thanks.
Nests
Use the film below to enable children to explore drawing nests. Try to create a sense of momentum – for example you might pause the video 4 times and ask the pupils to make a 1 minute, 2 minute, 3 minute and 4 minute drawing at each pause.
Encourage close and slow looking by talking as they draw – use your voice to attract their attention to qualities of the nest.
Try the same exercise using different materials, ie handwriting pen, ink and nib, pastel, watercolour…
Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge, Davis, United States. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons
Bird nest hanging on a tree. Free public domain CC0 photo.
Birds nest in tree, nature photography. Free public domain CC0 image.
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A collection of imagery and sources which you can use to prompt drawing in schools and community groups.
Please note that this page contains links to external websites and has videos from external websites embedded. At the time of creating, AccessArt checked all links to ensure content is appropriate for teachers to access. However external websites and videos are updated and that is beyond our control.
Please let us know if you find a 404 link, or if you feel content is no longer appropriate.
We strongly recommend as part of good teaching practice that teachers watch all videos and visit all websites before sharing with a class. On occasion there may be elements of a video you would prefer not to show to your class and it is the teacher’s responsibility to ensure content is appropriate. Many thanks.
This resource is free to access and is not a part of AccessArt membership.
Drone Footage Over Natural Landscape
Use the film below as source material to enable an exploration of drawing natural landscapes. You can also try to find drone footage of your own environment, or that of areas relating to projects you are covering in school.
Pause the footage at points which catch your eye and invite the children to make timed drawings – 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes or 1 minute.
Vary the drawing materials you use and work in sketchbooks or sheets of paper of different sizes and textures. You may also like to make multiple line drawings over one page – each with a different colour or line weight, to describe different pause points in the same film to capture a moving landscape.
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