Authors and Illustrators

This week is all about showing the Imaginators that writing and drawing or illustrating are two sides of the same coin and in fact being good at one can actually help to strengthen the other! 

In fact, illustrators and authors go through the same thought-processes when creating their end product... the COMPOSITION PROCESS. Both must learn to think, gather ideas, plan out a plot or try out different ideas, make corrections or edit until the finished product is up to scratch. 

As usual the older Imaginators started the day off with me in the art room. But since our end product for this week is a book that must first be written and then illustrated I used the time to talk to the Imaginators about the role of the illustrator in the real world and how they are actually hired by publishers to bring a book to life! Of course this week the Imaginators are going to wear both hats so they will have to shift gears from using words to get their thoughts across and then decide how to best draw a picture or pictures to get those same thoughts across or maybe even add another dimension to them. 

I also tried to get the Imaginators to tell me what types of books they liked to read... because what you are interested in reading will give big clues to what you might enjoy writing. I got some pretty interesting answers that ranged from adventure and mystery to game manuals! LOL... go figure. 

We also looked at different styles of illustrating using picture books I collected. Almost everyone was able to find a style they identified with right away! 

Since we are so integrated this week Aunty Reiko came across for a few minutes and helped guide the Imaginators down the path to figuring out their book titles or main ideas. Then the Imaginators and I spent the rest of the class figuring out who was telling the story (the main characters and even supporting characters) and they made some beginning sketches of what they might look like! 

Later the little ones came in with the words they wrote this morning and after some age-appropriate discussion on what an illustrator does, we jumped right in to adding pictures to the first pages of their little autobiographies! 

Take a look at some of the Imaginators reading their finished books!

See what they did at The Reading Garden! ​