We had nearly twenty participants during the first guest session of the season, an illustration workshop with Lavanya Karthik!Focusing particularly on her Dreamers series, Lavanya talked about her creative process, and how she chose various art styles for different books. The idea of the session was to get participants to work towards creating a self-portrait. To do this, she introduced three styles that she researched and used in her books--miniature Mughal art, which she brought into The Boy Who Loved Birds, Bhil art, which features in The Girl Who Loved to Sing, and mosaic art, which you can find in The Boy Who Built a Secret Garden.Step by step, she led the participants towards the final activity, asking them to list personality traits, choose a symbol or motif that represents them, and work on an elaborate frame, drawing from miniature paintings. We didn't have much time to … [Read more...]
The Art of Zines
We just had another rewarding guest session! Niloufer Wadia, an illustrator and Urban Sketcher, covered so much ground in one short hour with my creative writing programme - you can guess what I mean from the picture above! From showing us different kinds of zines to telling us about storyboarding, she led us through the process of illustrating our works, choosing what to draw and helping us understand how to draw it.The zines Niloufer showed us to begin with were lovely. Even though we're going to be creating an e-zine at my writing programme, exploring form and shape was fun! Moving towards helping us sketch on our own, she shared some limericks with us and then proceeded to show us how we could illustrate them. She began with a storyboard with very basic line drawings, and together, we came up with ideas of how to illustrate the set of limericks she chose.I also love it when … [Read more...]
The ART of Stories
And just like that, the third and last guest session at this edition of my online creative writing programme is over! This one was an illustration workshop, conducted by children's book illustrator and author Tanvi Bhat. As always, the participants had so many questions! Here are a handful.How do we create our own style of illustration?I loved how Tanvi explained that finding your own style is not as important as the content. Isn't that the same with writing too?I also found interesting the idea that an illustration does not have to be perfect; it has to carry the story. I think, here, the idea of 'perfect' is well worth examining. As a child, I was disturbed and annoyed by pictures that were untrue to the story, but if the big toe were on the wrong side of the foot, would I even notice?How long does the process take?The eternal question. Children are … [Read more...]