If you decided to put the text of the poem on the white pages, then you might not have room for a comic strip.

If this is you, then we are going to fill up the white border around the text with objects that are related to key words in the poem.

I have picked out the key words for you, as I felt some words lent themselves to illustration better than others.

Talk about it!

Remember we are only illustrating verses 2-5, on the white pages of our picturebook.

Verse 2:

• Magic
• It’s Halloween today so try and think of lots of magic things, witches and wizards and Harry Potter and pumpkins and spells and fairy’s and elves and broomsticks and wands and all sorts of other things to do with magic.
• You can make a spider diagram to help you think.
• When you have enough ideas, either draw the magic things yourself or find pictures from newspapers, magazines and the internet and cut them out and stick them in around the text.

Verse 3

• Electricity
• Cut out pictures of things that run on electricity; kettles and hairdryers and lawnmowers and motorbikes and anything else you can think of.
• Stick the pictures all around the text.

Verse 4

• Cross
• Try and find pictures of people looking cross. You can either do an image search on the internet and cut them out and stick them in, or you can put your new cartoon skills to use and draw lots of pictures yourself.
• If you are drawing pictures yourself then make sure the pictures all look different.
• We are trying to explore the theme of looking or being cross. We are not trying to draw one of our friends or family getting angry (although sometimes that is tempting.)

Verse 5

• Magic
• Because the poem repeats like a song, so does our theme.
• In verse five I want you to illustrate magic again, but this time chose a different type of magic.
• Look at the things around you in nature and creation and cut out pictures of things you think are magic.
• Some examples might be; the changing of the seasons, when all the leaves turn red and gold; the weather, thunder and lighting and so on; birds migrating; young animals being born…can you think of any more?
• Draw the pictures, or do an image search for the things you have chosen and cut them out and stick them on.

Doodle it!

Have fun, but remember not to stick things too close to the edge of the page, leave at least 3 cm of space all around as a border to leave room for your fingers turning the edge of the pages, and for the spine of the book.

Well Done!

You have taken part in ‘The Big Draw 2008′ and designed and illustrated a poetry picturebook!

You are officially awesome!

I expect that filling up The White Pages will take most of the weekend, but I will post again on Monday for some final advice on presentation, and putting your book together.

Big hugs!! xxx

What happens to the white pages is up to you. It is your chance to be creative and to shine – to make the book your own.

But I do have a few suggestions:

• Imagine a mini story for each verse and use stick men to act your story out on the white pages.
• You can use different colours for the different stickmen if you want to show who they are, or you could give them a meaningful accessory, like a hat, a hairbow, a distinctive hairstyle, a pair of glasses…
• Think carefully about the person you are trying to represent, and what makes them unique
• If they often wear an accessory or you associate them with a certain object, then use that on your stick man drawing.
• If you can’t think of anything then just draw them in a different colour and make sure it is the same colour all the way through, so your audience knows who they are.

• You can have five frames for each verse, to tell your story.
• If you are struggling with how to do this, you could tell your story over the five days of the school week, and label each frame Monday, Teusday, ect…
• Or three frames for each verse, to tell your story.
• If you are using three frames then you won’t have much time or space, so just think of a beggining, a middle and an end.
• You will probably need to use some text if you are using three frames to tell your story.

• You can arrange your frames going across the page, or up and down the page.
• Try and make all your frames the same size, you may need to measure them with a big ruler.
• Make each frame as BIG as possible.

Talk about it!

• Plan your story out on a peice of scrap paper before you draw it in your book.
• Ask your friend if it is clear what the story is from the pictures.
• If your friend is not sure, then you could consider writing in some text to make it clear what you are trying to tell people.
• Try to use as little text as possible.
• Most of the story telling should come from the pictures.

Adding text

• If you are going to add text to your comic you will need to plan where it is going to go before you draw your pictures.
• The pictures are the focus point of your story.
• You can add text to comics in three ways.

1. You can write in capital letters at the top or bottom of the page. this is like giving your story a narrator (someone who reads the story but does not play a charecter. Actors play different parts in a play or TV show, but story books are read out loud by a narrator)
2. You can add text in thought bubbles- this shows what the charecter is thinking, but we have already used this so I don’t want you to do this one.
3. You can add speach in speach bubbles- this shows a reader what the charecters are talking about, charecters say the text in their speach bubbles ‘out loud.’
4. Lastly, and this is a bit of a cheat, you can add text in sound effects.If you have ever seen the Batman comics they were great at this, and the even did the same thing in the Tv show: Pow! Zap! Bang! Wallop! You get the idea!!!!

• So try not to add too much text, as it may make your story look cluttered.
• Text in comic books is generally written in capital letters which are bigger than lower case letters and take up more room.
• Plan for the room that your text will take up in your story frame by drawing a straight line with your ruler and writing along it.
• You can try this on your draft drawing if you want an idea how long your line needs to be.

Doodle it!

Think of a mini story from your life for each verse of the poem ( verses 2-5) and get doodling!

Well Done!

This is a hard doodle, and you are being left almost completely on your own, but it should be lots of fun!!!!!

It’s up to you if you give your cartoon character a body, or just a head and shoulders. As we have drawn a 2D cartoon, that everybody knows is not completely realistic, I don’t think it matters if you give your character an out-of-proportion body.

You could give him or her a smaller body if you haven’t got much room. If I were you I would draw a stick man body for him. It is amazing what you can do with stick men if you think about it first!

How to draw a good stick man

• Don’t give him an extra long neck
• Make his body about the same size as his legs, or maybe a bit longer
• This isn’t realistic, but it will help you show movement and actions with your figure
• Make his stretched out arms about as long as his body
• Stick men don’t necessarily need features or hands and feet
• Sometimes it is best to keep things simple and try and get the movement right

Remember that arms are about expression and legs are about balance.

• If we want to show feeling towards someone we might lean towards them, or away from them.
• We can do a lot with our arms, we can stretch them out wide, fold them in our laps, cross our arms, put our hands on our hips, raise one arm in the air, scratch our heads, chew our fingers, the list goes on…
• You can show all of these things with stick figures
• When we make a movement with our arms or upper body, we use our legs to stop us from falling over.

• Legs can stand in a neutral position, which is shoulder length apart. Legs will often be positioned in this way if we are standing still – it looks relaxed.
• Legs can be close together, with heels touching, this pushes our spine up and makes us seem more alert – like the way soldiers stand to attention.
• Legs can bend. We can bend one or both legs or go down on one knee.
• We can throw one leg out to the left or to the right while keeping the other neutral – we often do this to balance out the top half of our bodies.
• We can use our legs to move, to walk, jump, hop and run.

For older readers

Balance: the human body is a complicated system of weights and balances. Our skeleton is finely balanced so that when we need to move one part of our body, we can adjust our skeleton by moving another part of our body to help stop us from falling over.

Often when one side of the body goes up, the other side goes down. You can think of it like a set of scales.

Talk about it!

You can look at sports pictures in a newspaper to get an idea of how this works.

Sportsman often move at high speeds and their bodies move in all sorts of complicated ways and contortions, but they still don’t often fall over. That is because their bodies automatically adjust to help balance them out as they are moving.

Athletes might have to train their bodies to respond in this way over many years if they are asking their bodies to perform a movement that is unusual, but everybody’s skeleton responds this way in real life situations.

It is more noticeable when looking at sports photographs because in Athletics and in other Sports, movements are often more exaggerated.

Doodle it!

Try drawing a stick man performing some everyday actions. Try and think of his body as a spine and keep a fluid line. Try and position his legs in the right way to help balance him out.

Well Done!

Well done, that’s brilliant!

Tomorrow we will see if we can finish your book off by drawing a simple stick man comic strip on the white pages, or using pictures of stick men and other meaningful objects to fill in the white margin around your text.

I have put the text for the verses along the top on different pages. There are also some back page credits for you to stick on page 10. You can write your own name in!

As this has been a project about drawing, we are not going to be too strict about layout. If you follow these guidelines your book should look brilliant!

1. Imagine your pages are numbered 1-10
2. Verse 1 is going to go on page 1
3. The back page credits are going to go on page 10
4. After that you can try this scheme. The pages with verses on are highlighted in bold:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

So, the pages with the verses on are going to be the same coloured pages that your cartoon character is on….

• Have you got enough room?
• Which text style you use will depend on how much room you have
• Why not draw a thought bubble around the text so it looks like your cartoon character is talking/thinking the words?
• If there is not enough room on the coloured pages you could draw the thought bubble on the white pages…it doesn’t matter…people will still know that it is your character talking….

Think about how you want your white pages to look…I think you have two choices…

• If your white pages stay blank then we draw a simple comic strip tomorrow to illustrate the story
• If your white pages have text on them then try and place the text in the middle, and we can pick out meaningful objects and people to fill in the borders around the text to the edge of the page  

Pick a style of lettering (font) for each verse of the poem.

• Your lettering should be the same all the way through.
• Make sure there is plenty of room for the lettering.
• Then print it out, cut it out and stick it on.
• You can stick it where you like, as long as it is not in the way of anything else.
• Leave at least 3.5 cm at the edge of the page where you fingers hold the page to turn it
• Leave at least 2 cm at the edge of the page that is the spine of your book
• You can geuss this if you like, but the golden rule is don’t go too close to the edges!
• Now neatly cut your text out, and stick it on the page you have chosen…

Well Done!

Well done, that’s amazing! 

Now draw your thought bubble….

The easiest way to draw a thought bubble is to draw your bubble around the text first, and then draw three or four smaller bubbles that get smaller and smaller as they get nearer to you cartoon charecter’s head… 

Good Luck!

Doodle it!

Now you have your four faces, beautifully coloured in or printed out, you will need to cut around them.

• Cut roughly around the shape of the face and hair in a nice shape, leaving a margin of white paper.
• Find your sheets of coloured paper you will be using and turn them to the right view (tall or long)

• If you want your face to pop up from the page then you can stick it on to some card, then cut the card to fit the shape of the paper face.
• Don’t cut along your contour lines, make sure there is a margin of white paper around your shape.
• You will have to stick something behind the card before you glue it to your coloured paper.
• Something like cotton wool or a thicker piece of card would be ideal.
• The cotton wool will sit in between the cardboard face and the coloured paper, and will make your face stand out slightly from the page.

• If you haven’t got the right materials to make a pop out face then just stick your shape straight on to your coloured paper. Draw a thin line around the shape you have cut out to make it clear that you did it on purpose.

• You will need to do this for all four shapes.

Well Done!

Well done, that’s brilliant. Later on we will be thinking about text and lettering. You are all doing really well!

Doodle it!

When you are happy with all four of the expressions you have drawn on your four photocopies you can think about colouring them in.

I was going to suggest using the computer, but as we are going to stick them onto the brightly coloured paper that we have prepared, I think that it might be better to use paler colours. You could try pencil crayons, but really anything goes.

If you do want to try using the computor then Microsoft Paint, or Apple’s free to download Paintbrush is a good way to start. They will let you open a file that is already on your computer and fill the shapes with colour using the bucket tool. You can pick the colours from a colour wheel and if you are using Paint then you can select up to six colours that go together and save them so you can make sure you use the same ones next time.

• Remember you will have to print the file out to get it off the computer again.
• If you make a change and you like it and want to keep it, then rename your file something new. This will make sure your file is put on the shelf in a new place and means that it won’t write over the old one. You can call your file something similar, like faceone.jpeg, and save it in the same folder, so you won’t loose it.

For Older Readers

If the computor programe you are using does not have a custom colour option, (when you can save the colours so you can use them again next time) then you will need to make a note of the colour code that is the #____ number that comes up in a chart when you select a colour from the colour chart (or square shape) This number is called a Hex code. In computor art every colour and shade has it’s own Hex code and if you make a note of it, you can type it in and find exactly the same one next time.

It’s a bit like the colour by numbers paintings you see in ‘real’ art.

Otherwise, you could use paints, pencil crayons, wax crayons or anything else you can think of.

Talk about it!

Try and think if you want to do anything different with the colour for the verse that says ‘it switches me on like electricity,’ you could make your cartoon charecter yellow with bright yellow hair for this bit, or you could make him fried with red and black electric shock treatment if you wanted to make it extra funny.

Well Done!

That’s really good. Later we will be thinking about page layout and where to put the text. You are doing really well! Remember, even if you haven’t been able to make any photocopies and you can’t do the faces yet, you can come back to them if you know what you are going to be doing.

Doodle it!

Now you have picked a feeling for each verse, try and draw it on to one of your photocopied faces. If you haven’t got a photocopy, try printing one out. If you haven’t been able to get to a photocopier yet, you can still plan what you are going to do.

Talk about it!

Practice first. A really good way of practicing is to cut a plastic wallet in half so you’ve got two sheets of A4 clear plastic. Then place one of the clear plastic sheets over THE FACE and draw on the expression; which is the eyes with pupils, nose and mouth.

You don’t need to bother with the face or hair if you are drawing onto the plastic as you will be able to see through.

You can try a few of these expressions on the same sheet. If you move your sheet quickly between them it can help you to imagine what your character would look like as an animated cartoon.

When you have found an expression that you feel captures the feeling then copy it onto the duplicate FACES in pencil (or pen if you are feeling confident).

Well Done!

That’s brilliant, your cartoon character is really beginning to take shape now!

• If you haven’t got a plastic wallet you could do a similar thing with tracing paper or greaseproof paper.
• If you draw on the top sheet with a pen, then afterwards you can put it underneath and use it as a guide.

Just to be clear your expression should include:

• Pupils in your eyes
• A nose – just a squiggle is fine
• A mouth

 If your not sure which feeling to pick you can chose one from my list. Choose one for each verse. You can try pressing the ‘Archives’ button if you want another look at the poem…

Landscape or Portrait

If you have a sheet of rectangular A4 paper, there are two ways you can hold it: landscape, or portrait.

Landscape is the long way, like the horizon line. This is why it is called landscape. Just remember L for Long.

Portrait is the tall way, so the paper is tall like a persons head and shoulders. This is the way paper comes out of a computer printer, so remember P for Printer.

How you chose to hold your paper can have a real impact on your drawing because it changes the space you have got to draw in.

For this project, you will need to look at your cartoon character, ________ _________, and decide which view is better for your book, landscape or portrait.

Make sure your character fits on the page.

You will need to remember to turn your page to the right view (tall or long) each time you plan a new page of your book.

Pages in your book

There will be ten A4 pages in your book. We will make the front and back cover separately.

• 10 x A4 pages
• Front cover
• Back cover

You will need to divide your pages into Left and Right.

A good idea would be to use some of the coloured paper I sent you for the lefts and plain white A4 paper for the rights.

So you will need:

• 5 sheets of coloured paper for the left. Pick one colour that you like so the lefts are the same all the way through.
• 5 sheets of white A4 paper for the rights.

I’ll send you some plastic wallets later so we can put the left and the rights back to back.

For now, just organise your pages in a pile so you have one colour and one white, one colour, one white and so on. Then stack the ten pages out of the way ready to draw on later.

Doodle it!

If you are having trouble thinking about your feelings while you read the poem, you could draw a spider diagram.

This is a picture that looks a bit like a spider. It has a subject written in the middle in a bubble, and lots of legs going off in different directions.  At the end of the legs are all your thoughts and feelings about what is written in the middle. You can also draw pictures at the end of the legs if you find it easier to express your feelings in that way.

For older readers

Lots of people (including me) find that spider diagrams help them to think more creatively about things because of the shape of them. 

Spider diagrams can also help you to find solutions to problems because they let you come up with lots of different ideas, and then chose the best idea.

Spider diagrams let you create, and then evaluate.

Talk about it!

I made a spider diagram for each of the five verses in the poem. Here are some of the feelings I wrote down. Some of them I have used more than once…

• happy
• pleased
• proud
• confident
• special
• surprised
• ready to answer or respond
• alive
• happy
• excited
• curious
• afraid
• scared
• as if i might be in trouble
• giggly, because it is funny
• happy
• safe
• warm
• loved
• contented
• sleepy

Now you have a go!