After writing about the making of a comic using the ideas and images of school children (read all about it here!), it’s time to show more work from Islington Council’s Unheard Voices project. Pupils would collaborate with poets and other creators, as organised by the fantastic performance poetry organisation Apples and Snakes.
Before I joined the project, children had already been working with the serious talent of Performer, Poet and Writer Inua Ellams. He’d gotten them to think about some pretty heavy questions, as you’ll see in the resulting work below.
Inua encouraged the children to express their ideas poetically through symbolism and metaphor. With his guidance, they also focussed on creating atmosphere in their writings considering use of all five senses.
When I joined in, helping out in a series of workshops, showing the children examples of many creators of Poetry Comics such as Bianca Stone and Paul K. Tunis. The pupils showed amazing ability to visualise ideas through symbols.
The class went on to illustrate their own stories based on big questions.
This first group of pupils drew simple images…
…which suited a kind of diary layout for their story.
The next group dealt with the spirituality and truth.
Their drawings were so strong I decided to keep them pretty well as they were, against a plain background.
I used traditional fonts and a two column layout to reflect the idea of a religious text.
Some of the children used nature based images for their stories.
Sometimes I added tone to a drawing or manipulated it a little. At the time of a student drawing the above tree, we discussed repeating the image to form a pattern in the final book.
The story below got pretty dark and the students involved created many images for me to play with.
These lent themselves nicely to a comic book style layout…
Inua’s encouraging the students to consider how the different senses would make a character feel really paid off…
Here I used dark and light backgrounds to represent the idea of danger or lack of it…
The images for the next story had a very child friendly look to them.
I reflected this in the layout, though the story itself contrasted with this.
The final story of the collection showed some clear and beautifully drawn pictures…
These were perfect for me to add grey tones to for a slick look.
The work ended up in this fabulous book alongside a comic strip made with other Islington based children.
For details of how that was made have a look at my earlier blog by clicking here!
All in all, a wonderful collection of ideas, story-crafting and drawing from the pupils.
