The Seas of the Abarat
I’m reading Clive Barker’s Abarat to my class. I never thought I’d get the chance to read Clive Barker to little kids so I am relishing this opportunity. And they’re digging it, from all accounts.
To kick it off, I did an art lesson based on the opening lines of the book:
The storm came up out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning.
It’s a fantastically brutal descriptive set of words to open a kid’s story on, and we all loved it. So I got the students to draw me a storm that would match this simile using crayon and they all really impressed me with their work. For copyright reasons I won’t show you what they did but I will show you my example that I hatched out in about 10 minutes while they did their own work.
I am surprisingly happy with myself on this one, it is by no means perfect but it’s a damn sight better than anything else I’ve ever attempted to draw freehand and without any visual cues.
Click the image to see a larger version, and I apologise for crummy image quality, it’s just a photo of the piece.
This may have inspired me to try a few more crayon drawings. It may have, only time will tell. I’m not really much of an artist, as most would know, but this was just fun. I don’t analyse what I did too much I just enjoy it. There are deficiencies in this picture, as there will be in many of my stuff, but there’s also stuff in here that I can really enjoy and understand why I did it.
I guess all you can do when creating is have a little fun.
Posted on March 31st, 2010 by ryan
Filed under: art, Uncategorized
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