Imagined Worlds and Characters: part 1
For the children who have been coming to my workshops for a while, it has been great to get to know them so well over the years and therefore develop the workshops around their likes, interests and favourite activities. Many of the children, particularly on my Tuesday evening and early Saturday morning classes, have been coming to my workshops since I started running them in 2015. They have grown and matured so much in that time and it’s nice to be able to respond to this by giving them an activity which they can perhaps approach by calling on their memories, ideas and skills they have learnt from previous workshops. Plus as I have said in previous blogs I don’t always give them the opportunity to draw as much as they would perhaps like – because this I feel is an easily accessible activity they can do at home or anywhere they choose – I always like to introduce new processes and techniques in my workshops. But for week 1, all they did was draw!
For this winter term workshop, we kicked off with an activity I did when I first started my workshops, but I have developed it and revised it. Drawing imagined worlds and characters using an image from a magazine (such as National Geographic) as a starting point. The young creatives were asked to develop a world around this, using a narrative which included a character, a setting, a plot and a mood. I love this activity so much and it is another great one of children of all ages – and it can send imaginations into overdrive! I know many of the children who come to my workshop are avid readers – and one of the favourite workshops activities they did in the past was illustrating extracts from stories. This activity for week 1 allowed them to create their own visual stories, using their starting point as a catalyst into a world of dragons, bank robbers, rainforests, melting polar ice caps, birds with superpowers and pumping pumpkins!
