Workshops

What an enriching session we had on illustrating picture books with Ashok Rajagopalan!

“I didn’t know this, but I make an angry face when I’m drawing an angry face!” Ashok said. “If I want to draw a sad face, I make a sad face myself.” I remember seeing something about Disney doing the same thing. Is it something all artists do?

Today’s focus was creating emotions in picture books. Among the most interesting things for me was the fact that the reader’s emotion can be quite different from what the character is feeling. Sometimes, a character is angry, or confused, but the reader laughs. This laughter is deliberate, and the illustrator must portray the character’s emotion in such a way that the reader feels compelled to laugh.

Using a series of drawing exercises, we worked on drawing emotion and then heightening these emotions, first through the face itself and then through body language, colours and setting. As with every art workshop I’ve organised, I’m amazed at how easily and quickly illustrators draw! Look at the top right illustration in the image above for instance. Isn’t it incredible? It was done in less than a minute!

What an informative session we had with Anupama Dalmia!

Anupama began by discussing what blogging is. From there, we went on to so much more – blog formats (including vlogs and micro-blogs), finding your niche, and starting your own free blog. She then introduced the children to SEO and the backend, showing them how easy it is to start the process of blogging.

Importantly, she answered the question of why blogging could be a good idea – to build a discipline around writing. Once we start blogging, there is often a sense of accountability, the idea that writing and posting content is something that we need to do regularly and systematically. Where do we begin? How do we get noticed? What can we do to increase the reach of our blog posts? Anupama discussed all this and more in a single hour!

When guest speakers repeat something I keep saying in class, I’m always happy. For instance, I often ask children what the purpose of their piece is. What do they want the reader to feel? What are they trying to do with their writing? Anupama phrased it as WIIFM – what’s in it for me? As the audience, this is the question we ask. Why should I read your blog? It’s important to be able to answer that!

With this workshop on blogging (guest session #24!), we’re now drawing to the end of another writing programme. In October, the twentieth batch of my online writing programme will begin!

Practice. What a difference practice makes! Right through yesterday’s guest session on character design, I marvelled at how swiftly Priyankar Gupta created his characters. Talking all the time, explaining what he was doing, he was able to draw not one, but six full forms in fifteen minutes!

Characters, both human and non-human, are led by three parts of the body – the chest, the nose and the pelvis.
An inquisitive person tends to hunch. The whole body structure is led by the nose. 
A confident person is led by the chest. This is why people in the army, or even dancers, tend to have accentuated chests. 
All of us also have an aspect of us that is lazy, one that likes to sit and watch the world go by. This sort of character is led by the pelvis.

Once Priyankar had shared a few sample drawings, he asked us to draw characters of our own. Soon, the children shared sketches of chickens and grandmothers, pencils and teachers. And as the participants shared their work, we discussed the breaking of archetypes in subtle and not so subtle ways.

Priyankar ended the session with a quote from Neil Gaiman – make good art. No matter how you feel, draw. If you’re happy, angry, bored, annoyed … draw. For someone who’s barely drawn anything for years, it was an important reminder.

Draw. That’s it.

How I love guest sessions! Yesterday’s workshop on nonsense verse with Anushka Ravishankar was a treat. It’s delightful how serious nonsense verse is! Full of contradictions, full of rules (of what nonsense verse is not), and full of surprises, we learned so much and wrote nonsense poems of our own too. 

Essentially, nonsense writing is a serious kind of writing which makes no sense. Does this seem contradictory? That’s where the humour of nonsense lies. While gibberish is not nonsense, we learned how we could use made-up words as part of a larger text, like in the poem ‘Jabberwocky’ by Lewis Carroll. I agree with Anushka when she says that it’s a shame that so many of Carroll’s words are now in the dictionary. They were never supposed to make sense!

We had a FULL batch yesterday, and the participants had dozens of questions, ideas, and poems to share. From Sukumar Ray to Shel Silverstein, we explored a range of writers, listening to all kinds of nonsense poetry.

For me, the best part was the very clear and organised set of techniques Anushka shared with us. How do we actually go about writing nonsense verse? When is it nonsense verse and when is it gibberish or fantasy? How can we straddle sense and nonsense so that our poems almost make sense?

Anushka ended the session with an exercise on nonsense verse, which was especially lovely, for it revealed how well the participants caught on to the sense of nonsense!