Sydney Writers' Festival 2016

Hello!!!

Last week my mum, my friend, her mum and I went to the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

It was very exciting to be traveling with a friend. We took two trains and one bus to get there. With a bit of walking in between. 

We got there early so we could line up for some tickets to see Frank Woodley and Aaron Blabey. They are pretty similar authors because they write AND illustrate their own books. 

I knew Frank Woodley from some other things like seeing him in shows on TV which were very funny. My Grandma introduced me to Aaron Blabey’s books and bought me four of them. She gave me Pearl Barley and Charley Parsley, Sunday Chutney, Stanley Paste and Noah Dreary. I was very excited to meet him.

About two weeks before the trip I decided to dress up as Sunday Chutney. Sunday Chutney is a girl who has travelled all over the world and is always the new kid at school. The drawings and the story are very good. Here is a picture of my outfit. I made it from scratch.

Aaron Blabey read us his new book that he’s been writing and drew some characters from his book The Bad Guys. He had a camera which was filming as he drew which was shown on a screen behind him. He also answered some questions from the audience. I asked the question ‘what advice would you give to a kid who wants to write a book?’ 

He said ‘write about something you are interested in and also keep working at it’. I think it was very good advice.

At the end of his presentation he gave out some of the pictures he drew to the people with the best questions. I got a picture of the character Mr Snake.

Frank Woodley’s presentation was very, very funny. He showed us how to walk like a muppet and something he used to do in a stage act which was a crazy game of tips. I laughed a lot. He also told us about how he taught himself to draw his artworks on the computer (my mum was super inspired by this and couldn’t stop talking about it).

We bought two books there. One was called The Ghost of Miss Annabel Spoon by Aaron Blabey and the other one was called Kizmet and the case of the Tassie Tiger by Frank Woodley.

On the train home we tried drawing the characters from the book The Bad Guys. We copied the picture of Mr Snake that I got and tried to remember how Aaron Blabey drew the others on stage. 

Here are the pictures I drew of them.

I feel very inspired by the two authors we saw and when I grow up I want to write a book. I hope through this post I’ve made you inspired too, S.

PS I photocopied the picture I got and gave it to my friend.

Mini origami books

Hello everyone! I hope all of you have had an arty week! I know I have. 

Anyway, today I will tell you how I made these origami books.

I started doing them more than a year ago now after we found this great video on making books from scratch. 

The first ones I made were based on the book Where is the Green Sheep? written by Mem Fox with drawings by Judy Horacek. I called mine Where is the Pink Mouse? and Where is the Yellow Owl?. I think I could do a better job of drawing the illustrations now but I still think I did a good job. I still have to finish one called Where is the Purple Cat?

Around that same time mum and I had been reading a book called How To Be An Explorer of the World by Keri Smith. The book suggests arty ways that we can ‘document and observe the world’ (see page 11). One of them is to start a collection based on the first object you see. So we went for a walk through town to see what we could find.

First we found a twisty blue ribbon at the park. So we were looking for twisty things or blue things or ribbony things. As a matter of fact we found a lot of blue things that day. I already had a tiny plastic blue bag and a blue plastic dinosaur which I added to the collection. I bet you’re wondering where the books come into it. Well, we decided to hold the collection in a homemade book and call it Everything is Blue. I typed out the words, printed it in blue ink and pasted everything into the book.

It’s not an everyday book, it looks a bit bumpy. It’s more like an art book.

I haven’t been doing these recently but doing this post has inspired me to do more. I’ll let you know how they go, S.

An arty Mother's Day

Hi guys, I hope everyone had a good Mother’s Day!

I missed last week’s post so I’m going to try to do two this week.

I went up to the Art Gallery of NSW yesterday and I did a ‘painting a ceramic platter’ workshop as part of Art Club 2016. I really liked it because the teacher was nice and all the other kids there liked doing the same things I do. And it also meant that my mum got a Mother’s Day treat of not having to look after me for an hour and a half.

The workshop was based on the Tang exhibition. I had been to the exhibition before but didn’t get to see the special cave where you can see a tomb through a tablet and you can see all these pictures and particular objects on the screen. They turn 3D when you hold the tablet up to the wall. You can see what the cave looks like in this video here (Mum: The tablet showing the digital recreation is at 1:45).

There was a tour guide in there who was showing everyone the cave. She showed us the dancers that come to life in the animation and a harp that moves and plays a tune.

First we drew our ideas for the platter on a piece of paper. We had printouts of the objects and paintings in the exhibition. There was a gold dragon that looked like Mushu from Mulan 2. I felt that a dragon was a little bit complicated for me to draw so I decided to do a brown horse based on a horse in the exhibition. 

My design is a mix of three different artworks, actually it’s a mix of two artworks and a scene from a movie. The first thing was a brown horse which was a sculpture.

And also from the style of one of the paintings. I mostly copied the style of the eyes.

The reeds were from Mulan 2. I remembered a scene where you’re looking down and Mulan and her gang are walking across a path next to where farmers are gathering reeds.

And here’s a picture of the plate that I did. 

Of course, I gave it to mum for Mother’s Day.

If you haven’t seen the Tang exhibition I highly recommend it

Looking forward to next time, S.