World Book Day

Mudchute City Limits

Struttin’

Last Thursday was my birthday, and as has happened a few times now in my working life, it was also World Book Day. I was booked to do workshops in a school on the Isle of Dogs*, about an hour away in east London.

Not much like this

I spent three 40-minute slots with Year 3 (7/8-year-olds), and I had such a nice day and a birthday gift reminder (not that I needed one really!) of how rewarding school visits can be.

I’d framed my workshop around comics, and one of the main things we talked about was realistic vs non-realistic drawings. It was entertaining to look at the pictures below with the children and hear their thoughts on realism and the types of drawings they preferred. My teacher friend at the school said they’d been working on communication with the children and it showed - in the last class quite a few of them prefaced their thoughts with “in my opinion”, which was charming and also really helpful for our discussion.

I’ve definitely had hecklers over the years of school visits - choruses of “that doesn’t look like a giraffe” (fair), which I now feel I head off with this realistic/non-realistic business - though of course that is NOT why I introduce the subject. :)))

We started by talking about levels of realism and what makes a picture more or less so. The children as I’ve said were 7/8-years-old, and they thought of everything - amount of detail, proportion, colour, lighting and shadow…

This was a fruitful slide! We spent quite a long time in each session on this - the children generally seemed to prefer the “more realistic” (and earlier) left-hand painting, but we did talk about how more realistic wasn’t necessarily better. I forwent explaining Picasso’s relationships to these women and just called them all his “friends” - perhaps we’ll get into that next World Book Day ;-)

We talked about our favourites among the crocs, horses and cats, and how humour worked in these characters. Interestingly (to me), Garfield and Tom & Jerry were still almost universally recognised, but Sylvester (and the Looney Tunes characters on my other slides) drew blank faces.

I think part of what I found so enjoyable in talking with the children about these concepts is that although I deal with them every day in work, I don’t think about them much at all. I’m not much of a cerebral artist, my colour theory is patchy (quite shit) and what works for me now has come through experience and trial and error rather than any great academic learning. Before heading off to the school, I looked up the definition of “abstract” as it pertained to art, as I realised I might know what it means, but couldn’t have explained it. So to discuss the whys and hows of these supposedly simple ideas with people coming to them early is totally beneficial and inspiring to me. And of course and more importantly, I hope to them too!

One of Picasso’s wives, and four of my husbands. Divorce with bottom left guy was quite amicable actually, we still send cards.

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* The Isle of Dogs is a sort-of island in the east end of London. It seems that the origin of the name isn’t known for sure, although it may be a corruption of Isle of Docks, Isle of Ducks, or some other dog-adjacent word. In the canine corner, it’s possible Henry VIII kept his many hunting dogs kennelled in the area. In any case, it’s no more doggy than the rest of London, which is QUITE doggy enough!