For several years I have been working on refining an art project that involves a number of distinct phases.
- Research an artwork from art history
- Presenting the research about the artwork and artist involved in the form of an infographic
- Writing a story aimed at primary school aged children where the researched artwork plays a central role
- Illustrating the story using a variety of drawing and/or painting techniques, traditional or digital
- Designing the layout of the pages of the book where images and text have to be combined
- ….and finally, the presenting a completed book
I will write about the use of infographics as an alternative to report writing on another occasion, but here I want to focus most of all on the story telling, the illustration and the designing of an online book. Due to the uncertainties of the way the school year was going to develop I decided early in this lengthy project that I was going to encourage the pupils to aim for a more digital based working process. In the end virtually the whole class chose to go virtually completely digital.
The story, once the research was completed, was hammered out on the iPads the pupils work with. Incidentally, I should mention that we are talking here of pupils aged 14 or 15 mostly, and as part of a bilingual education stream, the pupils are working in English, their second language rather than their native Dutch.
Digital illustrations were produced using a variety of drawing apps, before these were then uploaded into the Canva app (also a pc application) to work on the page layout and overall design. Even working on the relatively small iPad screen the pupils were able to produce some interesting and varied work.
When all the pages are complete a .pdf can be exported of the complete book.
The pièce de résistance comes in the form of the Yumpu.com website that allowed the pupils to upload the raw pages to the site to generate an online digital version with three dimensional pages that can be turned.
Click below to take a look at some of the possibilities the project offers from this year’s results:
Once we reach this point it is over to their teacher to grade the work on four criteria:
- The interest, complexity, and engagement of their story writing
- The use of English and grammar
- The quality of the illustrations
- The quality of the layout of the book
It is a lengthy project. But in a world where we are all (and in the art department) are having to lean heavily on digital means, it is a project that offers interesting online possibilities for classes that have a little digital know how.
Peter Sansom 
What a fantastic project! Your students’ books are terrific! Congratulations!
Thanks Patricia, I can recommend yumpu.com as an educational tool. It’s fantastically easy but gives wonderful results!
Thanks for this- I’ll check it out!
If only all children could be exposed to this.
So glad to hear that you like the project. For me it’s a returning theme polished up and adjusted each autumn to try and squeeze the best results out of the pupils!