Crash of Rhinos Exhibition

We joined some friends for a workshop at Waneroo Art Gallery where they were showing book illustrations from Crash of Rhinos by Patricia Mullins. We saw the original illustrations and storyboards from the book. The artist uses mixed media including, collage, photographs, pen and pencil drawings and crayons. Here are some of her images:

We had a go at using collage materials to make our own animal pictures.

Portraits Shaun Tan Style

After our visit to the Shaun Tan exhibition (see previous post), we decided to make some portraits in the same style. First we needed a collage background like in the picture book "The Lost Thing". The children used torn pages of sheet music, novel and dictionary pages. They were stuck down with plenty of PVA and scraped with a credit card to remove any bubbles. We've scanned the collage sheets in to keep for another project.

Before we tried a Shaun Tan style portrait we practised drawing eyes, mouths, noses and faces using realistic proportions.

Next we looked at Shaun's pictures to determine what makes up his unique style. We noticed his faces are elongated and the features are narrower and placed lower on the face than in real life. The children made a second portrait using these proportions. We mounted the portraits on the collage background and added a close up on the eye and some decorative boxes like in the book.

By R

By L

Shaun Tan Exhibition

Our local library and art gallery are showing "Shaun Tan: The Art of Story. Discovering The Lost Thing - Book to Film". It's a great little exhibition with original artwork from the picture book and film. The exhibition shows the process used to turn the picture book into an animated short film.

The children designed their own "lost things" for the kids mural at the gallery.

Shaun Tan created lots of mixed media texture pieces which were used to "cover" characters and backgrounds in the film. 

The children are going to take some of Shaun's ideas and incorporate them into their own story books for their entry into the Make Your Own StoryBook competition. Watch this space!

Perth Writers Festival

No pretty pictures for you this time I'm afraid. Today we attended the Perth Writers Festival schools day. We went to 3 talks by authors of children's books. All the talks were very entertaining, funny and inspirational.

First up was Alice Zaslavsky talking about her TV show Kitchen Whiz and her book Alice's Food A-Z. The highlight of the day was Andy Griffiths talking about his Tree House series of books. There was lots of audience participation as we invented a crazy story of our own. Lastly we discovered a new author Katherine Rundell who talked about the process she goes through to write a story. 

The children got to meet the authors and have their paperbacks signed. We learnt loads about how to write our own stories and were inspired by the enthusiasm of all the speakers. 

Adventure West - Around Esperance

Today we travelled on to Esperance. The weather wasn't brilliant, in fact there were some thunder storms which is probably what started this bushfire nearby.

We had a look around the historical village and the esplanade. As usual Dad and L beat R and I at mini golf. The kids took the miniature train ride.

We followed the Ocean Road tourist drive for cliff-top lookouts and the wind farm.

Hopefully tomorrow will be warm enough for a beach swim.