A creating a book for a toddler class at home!

Today I held my first ever 1:1 storybook class at home. At least it was kind of 1:1, the woman I was teaching had her lovely toddler with her.

The class worked really well, we played with creating a storybook and the little boy Neo played with my children's toys. Everyone was happy.

When I teach people how to create storybooks the first lesson is always spent looking at storybooks, brainstorming storybook ideas, choosing an idea and a story structure and then we get going writing the story!

I usually recommend the book is no more than 13 pages long (other wise it is easy to feel bogged down if you are not used to illustrating) and for toddlers I recommend you simply have one sentence on each page and write the story with the child as the main character. This makes writing the story relatively easy! Maximum 13 sentences!

If you know the child you are writing for well a simple description of how they start their day or what happens when they visit Grandma are examples of easy and effective topics. Your child will love being the main character of the story and having his or her own experiences celebrated.

Here is a peek at our 'work space'.

Collage illustrations experiments

Today I want to share with you my collage illustrating tips and to offer you the chance to take part in my online Create A Book For A Child course for a very tiny amount of the usual cost. I need some guinea-pigs so you would be helping me out.

But first I'm going to chat about making collage illustrations...

The other day I went with my family to the City Museum here in Gothenburg. The museum was holding a creative day for children and provided the children and their parents with pens, paper, glitter, glue etc... to use our imaginations and get creative.

I jumped at the opportunity to do something I have been meaning to do for ages, play with making collage illustrations.

Below you can see what I came up with.



Here I simply drew the shape of a car on some patterned wrapping paper I liked and then cut out the car shape. I wanted to have different colored wheels so I drew two circles about the right size on some yellow paper and cut them out. I then simply glued the shapes to a piece of blue paper!



I used the same technique with the image of this boy (my son Joel by the way). I drew a very simple boy shape first on some yellow paper, I then cut out the head, then the body, the legs, the feet and the hand shapes. I wanted this boy to be colorful so I took the cut out body shape and traced around it onto the patterned wrapping paper I liked and proceeded to cut out the body shape from the patterned paper. I repeated this with all the different shapes using different colored pieces of paper. When I was done I glued them onto my page to make up the shape of the complete boy once more.



I had a flash of inspiration with the fish in water collage. I simply cut out strips of silver paper and stuck them in a messy fashion to my page. I then drew very simple fish shapes (with the help of my daughter), colored them in, cut them out and then stuck them to the page so they 'swam' between the silver strips. I really like this one and so does my daughter!