Narrative Storytelling And Working With Schools

I’ve recently been working with secondary school pupils at St Brides School in East Kilbride with Magic Torch Comics. For this project we are taking excerpts from children that fled Germany in the 1930’s and relocated to the UK.

Key to the learning is to allow the pupils to find their own way through the story and share my experience of illustrating graphic novels. To get them infer from a story’s text, what else could be said and making their own choices in how to best visually tell the tale. .

The short version of Isi Metzstein’s account of how he experienced Kristallnacht was prepared to work with. The two pages you see here have been inspired in part from the classes own work. In my most recent session with the class my two pages inspired from the collaboration was presented to them for feedback.

As the project progresses I will be creating the full version of this story and a another by Dany Metzstein. These stories told as visual narratives will be an important part in telling these important stories to younger people.

Both will be available to read for free at Magic Torch Comics for schools and anyone else interested.

These interviews can be found here and tell of the horror inflicted on these young lives.

KA-BOOM! Superhero Team Character Design!

Another of my character designs for Sustainables Academy, this character named Shatter is made from glass and she informs learners about glass, how its made our use of it and the importance of recycling and cutting down its use.

I wanted to avoid cracks or sharp or broken glass elements to her look, as you can imagine a broken glass look would not go down well in a classroom! When coming up with her I though more about glass and the shiny polished look of glass bottles. As with all the Sustainable characters they are guided by a nineties cartoon series look and hopefully that comes across in the style of Shatter.

Shatter in all her Nineties style glory! Original character created in pen in ink.

Shatter with The Sustainables Team.

Follow the balloon, drawing is fun

Illustrating an artwork is fun and the enjoyment should reflect in what the final artwork looks like.  You can really get a sense of enjoyment in creating a scene, a snippet from life rendered on the page.  For this illustration I really enjoyed capturing in ink the types of character you might see in in a line up, different ages, clothing styles and mood. 

As you can see I like economy in the line, keeping it simple and bold and easy to read. This was for a double page editorial illustration with text to be added on top. It also came with a background variartion showing the scene in context at an airport. 

A Tricky Scene

Imagine a robbery at a newsagents and all manner of scary thoughts cross your mind, the potential for someone to get hurt, weapons, dangerous assailants and theft.  When illustrating a scene like that in a children’s book you have to step carefully.   Even when the tone of the book is funny you have to consider making the scene look dangerous and dramatic without having the illustration look too violent or scary.  At the same time you have to give the artwork a little edge as to not belittle how terrifying a robbery can be.  Performing a illustrated balancing act worthy of a trapeze artist starts with laying out the essential elements from the story and composing a layout. 

Creating a good concept illustration is key to developing the right tone and I’ll do that by taking a very rough sketch and using layout paper just go over it again until I get character, composition and tone the way I want it.   Getting it right at this stage means no later disappointment from the publisher by keeping the intention of the approved signed off concept in line with how the finished image will look like.

My Pen and Ink illustration for the Halloween Bandits

For my robbery scene, illustrated in pen and ink, I added in a few bystanders, a man protecting his dog, and a boy next to a jar of lollipops.  It really helps of course that my robbers were wearing Halloween masks and that alone helps keep the look fun, dramatic and not too scary.