Hire Chris & Catherine for a workshop (contact us here)
Book the authors of Mr Coconut to come to your school, festival or other event – and show the children just how they can dream up and make their own picture book! (See galleries from previous workshops.)
Download a printable PDF about our workshops
Our standard one-day workshop consists of three activities:
Storymining: ‘extracting’ stories from the children with questions and suggestions, all spoken, we take notes until we have a story outline
Storyboarding: breaking down the story into a sequence of images/pages, sketching illustration ideas on a storyboard sheet
Illustration: creating one page from the book with a collage using text, textures, models and puppetry
(see below for more details of what these involve)
After the workshop we’ll create a gallery of the children’s stories and illustrations, from which the children can download high resolution images of their work (see example galleries).
This is our one-day model – if you wish we can create sessions over a number of weeks where the children can make an entire book of their own…
Workshops in more detail:
Storymining
We’ll create stories based upon the children’s toys, heroes, friends – whatever is in their heads. We’ll find out by asking constant questions. The children do no writing, as that interrupts the flow of their ideas.
We take notes, but mainly have the children remember their stories so they can tell them out loud.
Storyboarding
Once we have the story we’ll show how to think in images: the importance of mapping out your story so that it fills all the pages of your book. And of deciding how many pages in your book!
Illustration
We’ll make a page of the children’ books in the way we made Mr Coconut – with puppets, collage, cut-out characters and photographs (depending on available technology). We’ll bring puppet-making materials with us, and use whatever materials are to hand.
If you would like to be kept updated about future workshops (we might do some different ones), please sign up here.