I continue to learn how to work with the various ways kids learn and create. Some students prefer to illustrate an actual sentence from the book, which requires a more literal interpretation, while other students prefer a more conceptual approach. In the photo above, a student studies keywords for missing pages in the book, including a few extra key phrases to see if they would generate any creative drawings — and they did! — So I then rewrote the book to fit the new pictures. One of my favorite pages, not in the original manuscript,s is about the worm astronauts. Worms indeed have been sent to space in NASA experiments.
And below, two students collaborate on one picture. It is quite common to see this level of cooperation at the STEM school. Still, it amazed me to witness the students so lost in the passion of the drawing that ownership never crossed their minds. Sometimes I would ask some students to illustrate a background image and others to illustrate the subject, which I would combine on the computer.
In the image above, you can see some impromptu drawing guides. They are impromptu because we kept adding them as we discovered more ways to keep the drawings consistent.
- Outline only
- No shading
- No color
- Fill up the page
- Draw big!
- Sketch the idea first
- In pencil with a light touch
- Be creative
- Outline in thin or thick marker
- Draw 1 good picture
- Not 2 bad pictures
