Wednesday, January 5, 2011

A book created together.

In my last post I spoke about the simple and effective creative prompt 'I wonder what would happen if...?'.

The inspiration behind that post was my daughter. One morning she brought a piece of paper to me with a picture of ice drawn on it with a story below that she had dictated to Daddy to write down. It began with 'I wonder what would happen if the ice never melted...'and I thought it was fantastic.


She then told me to make up a story that started with 'I wonder what would happen if trees never fell down...' As soon as she made the suggestion fun ideas started to flow in without effort (the magic of 'what if..?'). Together my daughter and I wrote a short 'story' using her creative prompt. Later that day when she was at kindergarten I took a few moments to sketch out possible illustrations for this new story.

I had intended to then paint the illustrations myself, however when my daughter came home and saw my rough sketches she wanted to add color to them straight away and as we had co-authored the story I couldn't refuse. So we sat down at the kitchen table and illustrated.

My little boy also joined in with the painting, however he wasn't so interested in the story, he was more interested in creating his own art work.

Below you can read our illustrated story. Enjoy!